Rationality of tolerance - An insight into the parent-child relationship

Through a formal analysis, this study clarifies how the trustee's sense of guilt over the abuse of the trustor's trust and the trustor's tolerance of the trustee's abuse of trust may play roles in attaining a cooperative solution to a social dilemma between two rational actors. The juxtaposition of rationality and emotion also provides a unique insight into the process of socialization. Modifying the situation considered by Becker in his Rotten-Kid Theorem, the study applies game-theoretic tools to an analysis of the social dilemma in the income transfer from a parent to a child under the assumption of conditional altruism on the part of the parent. The study derives many concrete, substantive hypotheses, which are empirically testable, regarding the conditions for attaining success in socializing the problem child, and it also discusses the role of the rational choice theory in explaining a socialization process by integrating emotions into the rational choice framework.