a contest of beneficence 99
did not encourage free riding but instead triggered a contest of benefi-
cence. Only if the helper benefits privately from the act or receives some
rewards from being credited for helping should we expect such behavior.
Even more puzzling is Van der Veen’s observation of bandwagoning in
aid allocation. Once a recipient receives a significant amount of foreign
aid, it becomes more attractive to other donors and is therefore likely to
attract even more aid flows (Van der Veen 2000 , 241 ). Given the scarcity
of aid, we should not see this type of crowding if donors are truly inter-
ested in helping as many recipients as possible. Barnett ( 2005 , 731 ) de-
scribes a similar dynamic in the allocation of emergency humanitarian aid
following the Asian tsunami in 2004. The disaster triggered a contest of
beneficence in which donors tried to outbid each other in order to avoid
censure and gain stature. Such crowding often saturates the ability of re-
cipient communities to absorb the incoming aid (Moyo 2009 ). Similarly,
we should not observe cases of symbolic assistance and tokenism. Only
if there is some value to the act of giving itself, independent of its effect
on the recipient or on the collective welfare of all group members, would
symbolic acts of prosociality make sense.
Competitions of beneficence suggest that actors gain some private util-
ity from prosociality. Indeed, one of the most common explanations for
international prosociality is that some of the donors actually profit from
their contribution. The financial compensation and training that donors
get for contributing forces to UN peacekeeping, for example, can allow
poorer nations to finance their militaries, afford better salaries for military
personnel, offer better training, gain operational experience, and stock up
on equipment (Bobrow and Boyer 1997 , 727 ; Shimizu and Sandler 2002 ,
654 ). This can explain why the top three contributors to UN peacekeep-
ing are Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, populous and relatively poor
countries. A similar argument is used to explain food aid donations. It has
been suggested that donors are simply interested in cutting expenses for
the storage of food surpluses and hence are happy to ship some of their
redundant stocks away (Uvin 1992 , 297 ).^12 This is a very plausible expla-
nation for some prosocial acts. However, while it works well for the top
contributors of personnel to UN operations, it is difficult to find an equiva-
lent benefit that can result from foreign aid or mediation in foreign conflicts.
However, there is no reason to assume that private paybacks are always
paid through material goods. If prosociality can generate secondary utility
in the form of prestige or pride, it can offer a more generalizable solution
to the prosociality puzzle.
