Indeed, self-interested behaviour was usually described as "vicious".
Yet people who condemn such narrowly self-interested behaviour with one breath, sometimes risk endorsing it with the next.
One response to the consultation would be to urge more direct action to curb the self-interested behaviour of some schools, rather than trying to change behaviour by smothering them in new forms of shared accountability.
Highlighting the role of irrational and self-interested behaviour in economic decision making, Conservative backbencher Matthew Hancock and his co-writer, Nadhim Zahawi (also a Conservative MP), presented a blueprint for legislation to protect the public against corporate negligence.
For an individual, it is rational to use a common resource without considering its limitations, but that self-interested behaviour will lead to the depletion of the shared limited resource and that is not in anyone's interest.
Rational decision making assumes that individuals will act to maximize their preferences and engage in self-interested behaviour, but the logic of appropriateness assumes that individuals will conform to external rules norms, routines, procedures, and roles often without consciously realizing that they are making a decision.
The axiom of self-interested behaviour suggests that to accomplish this, one must provide sufficient individual incentives [3], [4].
Theories that dwell on self-interested behaviour assert that individuals are less interested in the wellbeing of others and are driven primarily by self-gain.
This underlines the self-interest that infuses philanthropic engagement and the social usefulness of commercial endeavours, questioning 'the simple model of rational self-interested behaviour … central to economic theory' (Dees and Anderson, 2006: 59).
The idea that social relations and norms that discourage malfeasance can bring order to economic life provides a powerful counterpoint to the argument of senior policy advisors in England that incentives should be re-designed so as to harness and control self-interested behaviour [ 8, 9].
