ARGUMENTA OECONOMICA No 2 (31) 2013 PL ISSN 1233-5835 Anna Nicińska * WHY DO PEOPLE BEQUEATH? ∗ The question of why people would like to, or would not wish to bequeath, does not lend itself to an easy answer. This question has hardly been investigated by social scientists in Poland. The aim of this article is to present a critical and in-depth review of the foreign literature on bequest behaviour, and to advance propositions for subsequent research. The up- to-date state of the art knowledge leads us to the hypothesis that “bequests are left accidentally.” Possible approaches to testing the hypothesis are discussed with a particular focus on how informative the making of a will and the subjective probability to bequeath might be. We conclude that the up-to-date attempts to answer why people bequeath and whether people want to bequeath remain unsuccessful. Further research should include a study on the prevalence of inheritances accompanied with a will; intertemporal analysis linking bequest behaviour and will-making with the subjective probability to bequeath; and finally the development of the theoretical model accounting for bequest behaviour yielding testable claims. Keywords: bequest behaviour, planned bequests, accidental bequests, making a will 1. INTRODUCTION The question of why people bequeath has occupied social scientists for a long time, but Polish literature on this issue is rather limited. The aim of this article is to present an in-depth, up-to-date review of the foreign literature on bequest behaviour, and to advance a series of propositions and hypotheses for subsequent testing. Bequest behaviour could be approached as a casual economic problem of utility maximization. The motivation to bequeath can be expressed in terms of the utility function derived from bequests. Numerous motives to bequeath considered in the literature yield different utility functions. These motives will be presented and discussed in this article in detail. It is important to note that the motives underlying bequest behaviour are difficult to test empirically. The sole fact of bequeathing does not imply that there was a motivation to bequeath. Perhaps bequests are left by accident when individuals fail to consume all the accumulated wealth prior to death. ∗ University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences, Department of Population Economics and Demography