Abstract
Altruism is a prevalent trait in family relations, but its impact on the governance of family firms has been largely overlooked until a recent paper by Schulze, Lubatkin, Buchholtz and Dino (2001). Consistent with household economic, theories, they hypothesized that the founder's altruism engenders family agents' opportunistic behaviours. Drawing from recent contributions in behavioural economics, we propose an important moderator, the time horizon associated with the founder's altruistic preference, and then show how it contributes to a more balanced view in governing transactions in both the family firm and household.