Reciprocity theory (RT) and costly signaling theory (CST) provide different explanations for the high status of pro-community altruists: RT proposes that altruists are positively and negatively sanctioned by others, whereas CST proposes that altruists are attractive to others. Only RT, however, is beset by first- and higher-order free rider problems, which must be solved in order for RT to explain status allocations. In this paper, several solutions to RT’s free rider problems are proposed, and data about status allocations to Ecuadorian (...) Shuar pro-community altruists are analyzed in light of RT and CST. These data confirm that perceived pro-community altruists are indeed high status and suggest that (1) community residents skillfully monitor the altruism of coresidents, (2) residents who engage in opportunities to broadcast desirable qualities are high status only to the extent that they are considered altruistic, and (3) individuals who sanction coresidents based on coresidents’ contributions to the community are themselves relatively high status. To a greater extent than CST, RT straightforwardly predicts all of these results. (shrink)

Reciprocity theory (RT) and costly signaling theory (CST) provide different explanations for the high status of pro-community altruists: RT proposes that altruists are positively and negatively sanctioned by others, whereas CST proposes that altruists are attractive to others. Only RT, however, is beset by first- and higher-order free rider problems, which must be solved in order for RT to explain status allocations. In this paper, several solutions to RT’s free rider problems are proposed, and data about status allocations to Ecuadorian (...) Shuar pro-community altruists are analyzed in light of RT and CST. These data confirm that perceived pro-community altruists are indeed high status and suggest that (1) community residents skillfully monitor the altruism of coresidents, (2) residents who engage in opportunities to broadcast desirable qualities are high status only to the extent that they are considered altruistic, and (3) individuals who sanction coresidents based on coresidents’ contributions to the community are themselves relatively high status. To a greater extent than CST, RT straightforwardly predicts all of these results. (shrink)

Two main questions are addressed: (1) What standard defines the nonmoral good for humans, the prudentially rational life? (2) How is this standard applied in guiding and in assessing lives? The standard presented is “The Worthwhileness Principle,” which asserts that if one’s life situation is sufficiently fortunate, the aim is to maximize worthwhileness, the net balance of benefits over costs; but if one’s life situation is chronically, and substantially unfortunate, the aim is to minimize nonworthwhileness, the net balance of costs (...) over benefits. The principle is based on a two-sided, positivity and negativity, or cost-and-benefit-centered viewpoint, rather than a one-sided, good-centered viewpoint. Specifically, it includes negative ends, harms to be avoided, negative means, resource costs to be minimized, and negative luck, misfortune, unfortunate lives.Regarding the second question, the standard is applied prospectively in guiding lives and activities by means of prudential deliberation, prudential habits, and prudential spontaneity. It is applied retrospectively in assessing whole or partial lives using the Worthwhileness Scale. (shrink)

From a giant of health care policy, an engaging and enlightening account of why American health care is so expensive -- and why it doesn't have to be. Uwe Reinhardt was a towering figure and moral conscience of health care policy in the United States and beyond. Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's U.S. health care (...) system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it. The problem, Reinhardt says, is not one of economics but of social ethics. There is no American political consensus on a fundamental question other countries settled long ago: to what extent should we be our brothers' and sisters' keepers when it comes to health care? Drawing on the best evidence, he guides readers through the chaotic, secretive, and inefficient way America finances health care, and he offers a penetrating ethical analysis of recent reform proposals. At this point, he argues, the United States appears to have three stark choices: the government can make the rich help pay for the health care of the poor, ration care by income, or control costs. Reinhardt proposes an alternative path: that by age 26 all Americans must choose either to join an insurance arrangement with community-rated premiums, or take a chance on being uninsured or relying on a health insurance market that charges premiums based on health status. An incisive look at the American health care system, Priced Out dispels the confusion, ignorance, myths, and misinformation that hinder effective reform. (shrink)

This article researches factors that influence price fairness judgments. The empirical literature suggests several factors: reference prices, the costs of the seller, a self-interest bias, and the perceived motive of sellers. Using a Dutch sample, we find empirical evidence that these factors significantly affect perceptions of fair prices. In addition, we find that the perceived fairness of prices is also influenced by other distributional concerns that are independent of the transaction. In particular, price increases are judged to be fairer if (...) they benefit poor people or small organizations rather than rich people or big organizations. (shrink)

Physician-based transparency approaches have been advanced as a strategy for informing patients of the likely financial consequences of using services. The structure of health care pricing and insurance coverage, and the low uptake of existing tools, suggest these approaches are likely to be unwieldy and unsuccessful. They may also generate new ethical challenges.

A major challenge with the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence applications is to manage the long-term societal impacts of this technology. Two central concerns that have emerged in this respect are that the optimized goals behind the data processing of AI applications usually remain opaque and the energy footprint of their data processing is growing quickly. This study thus explores how much people value the transparency and environmental sustainability of AI using the example of personal AI assistants. The results from (...) a choice-based conjoint analysis with a sample of more than 1.000 respondents from Germany indicate that people hardly care about the energy efficiency of AI; and while they do value transparency through explainable AI, this added value of an application is offset by minor costs. The findings shed light on what kinds of AI people are likely to demand and have important implications for policy and regulation. (shrink)

At first glance, it may seem that climate policy based on estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC) presupposes a set of controversial assumptions, especially about what detailed knowledge regulators have about the impacts of climate change, and what the proper role of government and policy is in responding to those impacts. However, I explain why the SCC-based approach need not actually have these problematic presuppositions as well as why SCC estimates may provide the best guide to climate (...) policy when implemented in a way that incorporates a healthy dose of humility. The SCC-based approach can be used in a way that is ecumenical between the wide range of reasonable but incompatible views about the proper goals of government and policy, ranging from views that aim only at market-efficiency, to utilitarian views, to rights-based and other deontological views, to libertarian views, to virtue ethics views, and others. Beyond this, I suggest that the SCC-based approach can help us find an overlapping consensus on a particular climate policy given the range of reasonable but incompatible normative views endorsed in diverse societies. Finally, I consider a number of specific objections to the SCC-based approach that are especially prominent in contemporary discourse and policy debates. I suggest that even if we agree that all of these objections to existing SCC-based analyses have an important kernel of truth, nonetheless the correct response to climate change still involves substantial emissions reductions to be achieved via policy, and the best methods for deciding the magnitude of those reductions still depend essentially on the SCC-based approach. (shrink)

We study a joint pricing and inventory control problem for perishables with positive lead time in a finite horizon periodic-review system. Unlike most studies considering a continuous density function of demand, in our paper the customer demand depends on the price of current period and arrives according to a homogeneous Poisson process. We consider both backlogging and lost-sales cases, and our goal is to find a simultaneously ordering and pricing policy to maximize the expected discounted profit over the (...) planning horizon. When there is no fixed ordering cost involved, we design a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to obtain a near-optimal ordering policy and show that there are some monotonicity properties in the learned policy. We also show that our deep reinforcement learning algorithm achieves a better performance than tabular-based Q-learning algorithms. When a fixed ordering cost is involved, we show that our deep reinforcement learning algorithm is effective and efficient, under which the problem of “curse of dimension” is circumvented. (shrink)

Casgevy, the world’s first approved CRISPR-based cell therapy, has been priced at $2.2 million per patient. Although this hefty price tag was widely anticipated, the extremely high cost of this and other cell and gene therapies poses a major ethical issue in terms of equitable access and global health. In this Perspective, we argue that lowering the prices of future CRISPR therapies is an urgent ethical imperative. Although we focus on Casgevy as a case study, much of our analysis (...) can be extrapolated to the controversies over affordable access to other gene and cell therapies. First, we explain why this first-of-its-kind CRISPR therapy might be so expensive. We then analyze the ethical issues of equity and global health of early CRISPR treatments. Next, we discuss potential solutions to lower the prices of CRISPR gene therapies. We conclude that the approval of CRISPR transforms our obligations of justice and compels us to bring future gene therapies to the maximum possible number of patients with serious genetic diseases at affordable prices. (shrink)

We take a fresh look at the concerns about credit card pricing and empirically investigate whether the Credit CARD Act of 2009 has been successful in addressing those concerns. The rational choice theory of credit card pricing, which posits that issuers use back-end fees to adjust the price of credit to reflect new information about borrowers’ credit risk, predicts that issuers will respond to the Act by using alternative ways to price risk. In contrast, the behavioral economics theory, (...) which posits that issuers use back-end fees because they are not salient to consumers, predicts that issuers will respond by increasing unregulated non-salient prices. If the market is competitive, we argue that the CARD Act should also result in increases in some salient, up-front prices. But we show that if issuers have market power, reductions in non-salient fees may not result in concomitant increases in salient charges. We test these predictions using two datasets on credit card contract terms before and after the CARD Act rules went into effect. We find that the rules have substantially reduced the back-end fees directly regulated by the Act, including late fees and over-the-limit fees. However, unregulated contract terms, such as annual fees and purchase interest rates, have changed little. Post-CARD Act, consumers continue to face high long-term prices and low short-term prices, and imperfectly rational consumers still find it difficult to understand the cost of credit card borrowing. We thus consider potential improvements to the regulatory framework. We argue that improved disclosures that present to consumers the aggregate cost of credit under the contract, based on information about the borrower’s likely use of credit, would improve consumer outcomes. Furthermore, we suggest that regulators, rather than focusing on prices that are “too high,” should consider limiting the ability of issuers to charge introductory teaser interest rates that are in a sense “too low. (shrink)

Members of societies involved in an intractable conflict usually consider costs that stem from the continuation of the conflict as unavoidable and even justify for their collective existence. This perception is well-anchored in widely shared conflict-supporting narratives that motivate them to avoid information that challenges their views about the conflict. However, since providing information about such major costs as a method for moderating conflict-related views has not been receiving much attention, in this research, we explore this venue. We examine what (...) kind of costs, and under what conditions, exposure to major costs of a conflict affects openness to information and conciliatory attitudes among Israeli Jews in the context of the intractable Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Study 1 revealed that interventions based on messages providing information on mental health cost, economic cost, and cost of the conflict to Israeli democracy had no significant effect on perceptions of the participants of these prices, openness to new information about the conflict, or support for conciliatory policies. However, the existing perceptions that participants had about the cost of the conflict to Israeli democracy were positively associated with openness to alternative information about the conflict and support for conciliatory policies. Therefore, in Study 2, we tested whether providing information about future potential costs to the two fundamental characteristics of Israel, a democracy or a Jewish state, created by the continuation of the conflict, will induce attitude change regarding the conflict. The results indicate that information on the future cost to the democratic identity of Israel significantly affected the attitude of the participants regarding the conflict, while the effect was moderated by the level of religiosity. For secular participants, this manipulation created more openness to alternative information about the conflict and increased support for conciliatory policies, but for religious participants, it backfired. We discuss implications for the role of information about losses and the relationship between religiosity and attitudes regarding democracy and conflict. (shrink)

Based on a sample of firms from 20 countries around the world, this study investigates how the relationship between corporate social responsibility and bank loan pricing is affected by the degree of national stakeholder orientation. We find that firms with superior CSR performance are more likely to enjoy lower loan costs in more stakeholder-oriented countries than are their counterparts in less stakeholder-oriented countries. This study contributes to the CSR literature by highlighting the importance of national institutional environments in determining (...) the economic consequences of CSR practices. (shrink)

Estimating the financial value of pain informs issues as diverse as the market price of analgesics, the cost-effectiveness of clinical treatments, compensation for injury, and the response to public hazards. Such costs are assumed to reflect a stable trade-off between relief of discomfort and money. Here, using an auction-based health market experiment, we show the price people pay for relief of pain is strongly determined by the local context of the market, determined either by recent intensities of pain, or (...) their immediately disposable income, but not overall wealth. The absence of a stable valuation metric suggests that the dynamic behaviour of health markets is not predictable from the static behaviour of individuals. We conclude that the results follow the dynamics of habit formation models of economic theory, and as such, the study provides the first scientific basis for this type of preference modelling. (shrink)

Abstract:Our research investigated pricing policies of fast-food restaurants in predominantly black neighborhoods. We argue that the lack of monitoring of franchisees’ pricing policies leads to higher prices. Results indicate that franchisees are significantly more likely than company-owned outlets to charge higher prices based on the proportion of blacks in a neighborhood. These price differences do not appear to be explained away by cost or competition factors. Our findings do not establish an intent to discriminate; nevertheless, we discuss (...) the fairness of the pricing structure found. (shrink)

The author, a cardiac surgeon specialising in heart transplantation, argues that excellence in medicine must always be pursued and confronts the problems of specialties and super-specialties with widely varying costs and benefit in which the pursuit of excellence results. He advocates that decisions on resource allocation should be the responsibility of the Department of Health and Social Security, acting on the advice of the public's elected representatives on the one hand and the medical profession on the other. The profession has (...) an ever-increasing responsibility to ensure that its advice is soundly based on rigorous self-audit, which should include considering the costs and benefit of its work. His commentator, Lady McCarthy, until recently chairman of an area health authority, responds by arguing that the tripartite system for resource allocation does not work. Doctors resent the imposition of any priorities other than their own. Their two-dimensional medical ethics, concerning doctors' obligations to individual patients, must be supplemented by concern for society as a whole. Both papers are based on contributions to the 1982 annual conference of the London Medical Group on Appropriate Medicine. (shrink)

Purpose Students have direct access to academic ghost writers who are able to provide for their assessment needs without the student needing to do any of the work. These ghost writers are helping to fuel the international industry of contract cheating, raising ethical dilemmas, but not much is known about the writers, their business or how they operate. This paper aims to explore how the ghost writers market their services and operate, based on observable information. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews data (...) from providers actively offering contract cheating services available to the public on Fiverr.com, a low-cost micro outsourcing site. The search term write essay is used to identify providers, finding 103 Gigs from 96 unique providers. Visible information, such as provider marketing, advertised services, pricing information and customer reviews, is analysed. Findings The results demonstrate that bespoke essays are readily available to students at a low cost. The majority of providers operate from Kenya. Revenue calculations indicate a price point of US$31.73 per 1,000 words, below the cost of traditional essay mills, but show that these 96 providers have generated around US$270,000 of essay writing business between them. Originality/value This study affords a look into a complex and established industry whose inner workings are normally kept private and for which little published information currently exists. The research adds to what is known about the extent, location and operation of the contract cheating industry. (shrink)

According to information asymmetry theory and stakeholder theory, this article explores the impact and mechanism of environmental, social, and governance information disclosure on the company’s future stock price crash risk based on the A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2019. We find that ESG information disclosure significantly reduces the company’s future stock price crash risk. This conclusion remains robust after a series of robustness tests, such as PSM-DID. The heterogeneity analysis shows that the negative relationship between ESG disclosure and stock (...) price crash risk is more significant in state-owned enterprises, companies with higher agency costs, and when companies in the bull market. The mechanism is that companies choose to disclose ESG information to alleviate information asymmetry problems and enhance corporate reputation capital, thus reducing the future stock price crash risk. This article shows that strengthening ESG construction will help improve the efficiency of China’s resource allocation and promote the capital market development. (shrink)

In this article, we use the two-sided market theory as a support and take the operating data of eight Chinese third-party payment platform companies as samples, based on pricing models and multiple regression analysis, to build a price feature model for a third-party payment platform. The results show that under the two-sided market environment, the scale of consumer and the same-side network externality of the merchant have a negative significant effect on the pricing of the third-party payment platform (...) to the seller; The market share of the platform and the bank fee cost of the platform have a positive significant effect on the pricing of a third-party payment platform to the merchant. At the same time, the same-side network externality of the seller, the scale of a merchant, and the selection of the business model of the platform have no significant effect on the pricing of the third-party payment platform to the merchant. These conclusions provide a scientific basis for a third-party payment platform enterprise to develop an appropriate pricing strategy and operating model. (shrink)

We consider Effort Games, a game-theoretic model of cooperation in open environments, which is a variant of the principal-agent problem from economic theory. In our multiagent domain, a common project depends on various tasks; carrying out certain subsets of the tasks completes the project successfully, while carrying out other subsets does not. The probability of carrying out a task is higher when the agent in charge of it exerts effort, at a certain cost for that agent. A central authority, (...) called the principal, attempts to incentivize agents to exert effort, but can only reward agents based on the success of the entire project.We model this domain as a normal form game, where the payoffs for each strategy profile are defined based on the different probabilities of carrying out each task and on the boolean function that defines which task subsets complete the project, and which do not. We view this boolean function as a simple coalitional game, and call this game the underlying coalitional game. We suggest the Price of Myopia as a measure of the influence the model of rationality has on the minimal payments the principal has to make in order to motivate the agents in such a domain to exert effort.We consider the computational complexity of testing whether exerting effort is a dominant strategy for an agent, and of finding a reward strategy for this domain, using either a dominant strategy equilibrium or using iterated elimination of dominated strategies. We show these problems are generally #P-hard, and that they are at least as computationally hard as calculating the Banzhaf power index in the underlying coalitional game. We also show that in a certain restricted domain, where the underlying coalitional game is a weighted voting game with certain properties, it is possible to solve all of the above problems in polynomial time. We give bounds on PoM in weighted voting effort games, and provide simulation results regarding PoM in another restricted class of effort games, namely effort games played over Series-Parallel Graphs. (shrink)

One of the most important principles of the European Community law is the prohibition of the abuse of a dominant position based on Article 82 of the EC Treaty. Predatory pricing is one of the forms of the abuse of a dominant position. It is likely that the world financial and economic crisis will lead to an increase in competition among the undertakings. The fact that some dominant undertakings seeking to sustain or increase their market share might decide to (...) engage in predatory pricing and that no comprehensive research on predatory pricing has been carried out by legal scholars in Lithuania and the European Union up to date, underlines the relevance of this study. To decide whether dominant undertaking has become a “predator”, it is necessary to evaluate several issues, such as the ability of the dominant undertaking to recoup its losses incurred during the alleged application of predatory pricing strategy. The judicial institutions of the European Union pay little attention to this issue and might recognize that predatory pricing took place even without the evidence on the possibility for the undertaking to recoup its predatory losses. This study analyses the recovery of predatory losses by the dominant undertaking and the importance of such recovery in determining whether or not the dominant undertaking engaged in predatory pricing. (shrink)

Sometimes we believe that others receive harmful information. However, Marschak’s value of information framework always assigns non-negative value under expected utility: it starts from the decision maker’s beliefs – and one can never anticipate information’s harmfulness for oneself. The impact of decision makers’ capabilities to process information and of their expectations remains hidden behind the individual and subjective perspective Marschak’s framework assumes. By introducing a second decision maker as a point of reference, this paper introduces a way for evaluating others’ (...) information from a cross-individual, imperfect expectations perspective for agents maximising expected utility. We define the cross-value of information that can become negative – then the information is “harmful” from a cross-individual perspective – and we define (mutual) cost of limited information processing capabilities and imperfect expectations as an opportunity cost from this same point of reference. The simple relationship between these two expected utility-based concepts and Marschak’s framework is shown, and we discuss evaluating short-term reactions of stock market prices to new information as an important domain of valuing others’ information. (shrink)

During the past few years information has increasingly become a commodity. As a commodity the atypical cost structure of information goods in competitive markets result in the price of reproduction of information goods tending to zero implying that market failure is highly likely. Intellectual property rights prevent such market failure by protecting the ability of creators and/or distributors to charge for information goods and as such serve to stimulate and support the creation of information. But information also plays a (...) vital role in enabling people‘s human rights in their everyday lives and it is therefore of paramount importance that such information be accessible. Pricing of information is one of the main factors determining accessibility and pricing strategies should aim to maximise access not just profit and thereby contribute to a socially just world. This paper examines the nature and pricing of information goods and suggests differential pricing of information goods based Rawls‘ principles of social justice. (shrink)

The present research is the first part of econometric study of the so called sponsored goods and looks at one of the most common types of such goods namely art products created by theaters, concert organizations and museums. The aim of the paper is to analyse the performance of Russian art organizations to find out to what extend the conditions of their functioning in post Soviet times under the development of market economy, democratization of leisure and changes in consumer preferences (...) influence their economic results. Could Russian theaters, museums and concert organizations be self- sufficient in market economy established in Russian in 1991-2010?The set up task determined the object of the study and the statistical data to be used-40 years time series performance indicators that include equal time intervals-1971-1990 for performing arts organizations and 1991-2010-for theaters, concert organizations and museums. The specifics of calculations presented in the article result from the very approach to the testing of cost disease. Its essence is to reveal the symptoms of this disease in art organizations taken as an element of economy as a whole rather than only as a part of cultural activities. Accordingly a new method of diagnostics of the cost disease is suggested that is based on development of specific indexes measuring the lag of labor productivity, advancing dynamics of wages and priority growth in prices for tickets in relation to the corresponding indexes of macroeconomic dynamics as well as determination of cost disease consequences-the deficit of income of providers of cultural goods. The implementation of such an approach allowed to construct three-dimensional space which coordinates describe the dynamics of performance results of art organizations. (shrink)

This paper uses agent-based modelling to study the frequent booms and busts in Chinese agricultural markets. First, an artificial agricultural commodity market consisting of heterogeneous agents, such as producers, consumers, and speculators, is built. A numerical simulation suggests that speculation can cause large price fluctuations via nonlinear price dynamics. Then, parameters are estimated by the simulated method of moments using garlic and ginger price data in China from 2006Q2 to 2018Q3. The estimation yields a statistically significant speculative behavior parameter, supporting (...) speculators’ existence. Based on the well-estimated model, a low-cost policy experiment aiming at market stabilization is carried out. The essence of this policy is to release the theoretical steady state of the estimated model as the government-guided price to producers. The guided price, even partially followed by producers, can reduce simulated price variances and weaken speculators’ negative impact on market stability. Robustness tests show that the effect of policy experiment is robust under a 20% change in any parameter value or a 5% change in the guided price. (shrink)

Artificial intelligent (AI) systems used in medicine are often very reliable and accurate, but at the price of their being increasingly opaque. This raises the question whether a system’s opacity undermines the ability of medical doctors to acquire knowledge on the basis of its outputs. We investigate this question by focusing on a case in which a patient’s risk of recurring breast cancer is predicted by an opaque AI system. We argue that, given the system’s opacity, as well as the (...) possibility of malfunctioning AI systems, practitioners’ inability to check the correctness of their outputs, and the high stakes of such cases, the knowledge of medical practitioners is indeed undermined. They are lucky to form true beliefs based on the AI systems’ outputs, and knowledge is incompatible with luck. We supplement this claim with a specific version of the safety condition on knowledge, Safety*. We argue that, relative to the perspective of the medical doctor in our example case, his relevant beliefs could easily be false, and this despite his evidence that the AI system functions reliably. Assuming that Safety* is necessary for knowledge, the practitioner therefore doesn’t know. We address three objections to our proposal before turning to practical suggestions for improving the epistemic situation of medical doctors. (shrink)

On January 1, 2006, Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage was initiated. Concern was immediately voiced by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and Families USA that, in response to this program, the pharmaceutical industry may raise prices for drugs most often used by the elderly. This article examines the ethical implications of a revenue-maximizing pricing strategy in an industry in which third party financing mitigates an end product's true cost to the user. The perspectives of three (...) stakeholder groups are examined: the elderly, as consumers of prescription drugs, the pharmaceutical industry, as product manufacturer and beneficiary of derived profits, and the total U. S. population, as the ultimate payer for the program via tax revenues. Key questions explored include the relationships among price strategy and access to drugs at both the micro (Medicare cohort) and macro (total population) levels, and on drug development or enhancement. The role of profit in a capitalism-based health care system is also examined. Hospital industry impact on these same stakeholder groups in response to the original 1965 Medicare law is used to compare and contrast possible outcomes of the new drug program. It is predicted that pharmaceutical firms will mimic the hospital industry, adopting a price maximizing strategy for drugs covered by the program. In the process, a utilitarian effect occurs: the benefits of increased access and diffusion of drugs counterbalance inequities in financing Medicare Part D. (shrink)

Urban centers are being transformed into consumer tourist playgrounds made possible by dense networks of surveillance. The safety and entertainment however, come at an unseen price. One of the historical roots of surveillance can be connected to the modern information base of tracking individuals for economic and political reasons. Though its antecedents can be traced via Foucault's account of panoptic discipline which walled in society's outcasts for rehabilitation, the following essay explores the shift to the urban panopticism of today (...) where society's outcasts are subtly filtered out of "public" view. Juxtaposing a sociological account of the concentration camp with urban Disneyization fosters a greater understanding of how surveillance creates certain categories of citizenship. In particular, how urban surveillance intensifies Walter Benjamin's description of the flâneur who often experiences the brunt of the new urban panopticon's filtering power. (shrink)

Insurance markets have always relied on large amounts of data to assess risks and price their products. New data-driven technologies, including wearable health trackers, smartphone sensors, predictive modelling and Big Data analytics, are challenging these established practices. In tracking insurance clients’ behaviour, these innovations promise the reduction of insurance costs and more accurate pricing through the personalisation of premiums and products. Building on insights from the sociology of markets and Science and Technology Studies, this article investigates the role of (...) economic experimentation in the making of data-driven personalisation markets in insurance. We document a case study of a car insurance experiment, launched by a Belgian direct insurance company in 2016 to set up an experiment of tracking driving style behavioural data of over 5000 participants over a one-year period. Based on interviews and document analysis, we outline how this in vivo experiment was set-up, which interventions and manipulations were imposed to make the experiment successful, and how the study was evaluated by the actors. Using JL Austin’s distinction between happy and unhappy statements, we argue how the experiment, despite its failure not to provide the desired evidence, could be considered a ‘happy’ event. We conclude by highlighting the role of economic experiments ‘in the wild’ for the making of future markets of data-driven personalisation. (shrink)

This paper studies the dynamic characteristics of triopoly models that are constructed based on a 3-dimensional Cobb–Douglas utility function. The paper presents two parts. The first part introduces a competition among three rational firms on which their prices are isoelastic functions. The competition is described by a 3-dimensional discrete dynamical system. We examine the impact of rationality on the system’s steady state point. Studying the stability/instability of this point, which is Nash equilibrium and is unique in those models, is illustrated. (...) Numerically, we give some global analysis of Nash point and its stability. The second part deals with heterogeneous scenarios. It consists of two different models. In the first model, we assume that one competitor adopts the local monopolistic approximation mechanism while the other opponents are rational. The second model assumes two heterogeneous players with LMA mechanism against one rational firm. Studies show that the stability of NE point of those models is not guaranteed. Furthermore, simulation shows that when firms behave rational with symmetric costs, the stability of NE point is achievable. (shrink)

This paper argues that there may be instances where assessing wildlife for monetary valuation might be quite reasonable and useful for public policy, even when there are strong arguments against valuation of wildlife and nature. A case of deer population management is considered where continued growth of the deer population will lead to more property damage and habitat loss. However, deer population control raises ethical questions on the rights of animals to exist and on the rights of humans to arbitrarily (...) interfere. The contingent valuation methodology is used to value preferences for deer management for the purpose of guiding public policy. The valuation estimates show that ethical concerns about killing deer affect the level of willingness to pay in a quite a logical manner. However, for individuals with rights-based preferences, CVM is not appropriate. The survey results also show that individuals with rights-based preferences are a small minority in this particular example. (shrink)

Places have very different faces. My place can be the home where I live, the country where I was born, the town where I work, the garden I cultivate, the continent of our shared past or even the cosmos as a whole. If we look at the history of modern economic thought, land as a scarce resource has played an important role. For the school of Physiocrats in the eighteenth century, land was the main if not the only source of (...) value creation. With modern industrialization and the rise of classical economics labor became the creator and measure of monetary worth. Later on, neoclassical economists considered utility (pleasure, happiness) as the measure of value creation and price formation.In today’s economics ‘place’ only becomes relevant when it is perceived as a scarce good. An economist is not interested in the uniqueness of a specific locale, nor in its memories and stories. The laws of economics apply to every place and hence to no specific place. Space and place are considered factors in a production function or elements of consumption and entertainment. From the moment scarcity arises, opportunity cost, competition and price formation and regulation become part of the game. When, e.g., the oceans become the subject of intensive human exploitation and competition, they need political and economic regulation. All these features can be subsumed under the umbrella of ‘economics of place’. However, by place-based economics we mean something altogether different. While the economics of place primarily envisage place as an instrumental good used for the maximization of human utility, the proposed alternative views place as an existential good that creates meaning and identity for people.In a first section I will now explore the existential meaning of ‘place’ starting from Martin Heidegger’s definition of the human being as Da-sein which means literally being-there, being rooted in a specific place. In the second section I will reconstruct a well-known theorem in economics called the tragedy of the commons. It explains how places can be degraded from communal property where relations matter to instrumental goods for individual profit maximization. The third section revisits the first theoretical model of place-based economics in Western philosophy developed by Aristotle in the fourth century BC. It is fascinating to see how this Aristotelian model of oiko-nomia gradually lost its grip in subsequent centuries. In the last section I reflect on some proposals of E.F. Schumacher to recontextualize the Aristotelian model of place-based economics. (shrink)

The financial toxicity of biotherapeutic treatments is examined. Kymriah, a new gene therapy, has a list price of $475,000 per treatment; Yescarta, from Kite Pharma, costs $373,000 per treatment. Such costs are a significant burden on patients, patients’ families, payers, health care systems, and communities. Studies have shown that financial toxicity—the effect of excessive treatment cost—diminishes patients’ quality of life, compliance, and survival. Some pharmaceutical companies promote outcomes-based pricing and other strategies to offset financial toxicity, but these approaches (...) have not been shown to reduce burdens. Catholic teaching holds that the benefits of treatment should outweigh its burdens, and that burdensome treatments are not obligatory. The financial toxicity of treatments should be included in the ethical assessment of burdens on the patient. (shrink)

Electricity deregulation was meant to improve the quality of people’s lives by lowering the cost of a critical commodity. In every state that has chosen deregulation, however, power companies, free from the oversight of state regulators, have increased prices and, in California’s case, have driven a utility to bankruptcy. It is clear that deregulation was intended to benefit the energy industry more than consumers by removing cost-based regulations that restricted corporate profits but guaranteed low prices and reliable service (...) to consumers. Deregulation proponents argued that California’s commitment to strong air quality standards prevented development of adequate power plant construction and that not a single power plant was constructed in California in the 1990s. This claim is refuted through an examination of California Energy Commission data. Although other states’ experiences are not as dramatic as California’s, serious problems will emerge if deregulation continues to dominate the policy agenda. (shrink)

_In the pursuit of health and well-being, healthcare innovation shines as a beacon of hope, promising treatments for once-unconquerable ailments and improved quality of life. However, the chasm between the brilliance of innovation and the reality of patient access poses a complex economic challenge. This article delves into the intricate relationships between healthcare innovation, economic forces, and equitable access, analyzing the factors that drive innovation, the barriers to widespread adoption, and the potential policy remedies to bridge the chasm. By navigating (...) the labyrinth of costs, incentives, and ethical considerations, we can chart a course towards a healthcare system where innovation flourishes for the benefit of all, not just the privileged few._. (shrink)

Salop’s “Circular City” model of spatial competition is generalized to higher dimensions, and to “transportation” costs which are a power of distance. Assuming free entry, mill pricing is compared to location-based price discrimination. For dimensions above one, there is some too little entry below some cutoff power, and too much entry above it. This cutoff cost-power rises with dimension, and is larger under price discrimination. Mill pricing induces more entry for powers of four or less, and less (...) entry for powers of five or more. Overall, too much entry seems a more severe problem, which tends to price discrimination. (shrink)

Over the past decades, anti-cancer treatments have evolved rapidly from cytotoxic chemotherapies to targeted therapies including oral targeted medications and injectable immunooncology and cell therapies. New anti-cancer medications come to markets at increasingly high prices, and health insurance coverage is crucial for patient access to these therapies. State laws are intended to facilitate insurance coverage of anti-cancer therapies.Using Massachusetts as a case study, we identified five current cancer coverage state laws and interviewed experts on their perceptions of the relevance of (...) the laws and how well they meet the current needs of cancer care given rapid changes in therapies. Interviewees emphasized that cancer therapies, as compared to many other therapeutic areas, are unique because insurance legislation targets their coverage. They identified the oral chemotherapy parity law as contributing to increasing treatment costs in commercial insurance. For commercial insurers, coverage mandates combined with the realities of new cancer medications — including high prices and often limited evidence of efficacy at approval — compound a difficult situation. Respondents recommended policy approaches to address this challenging coverage environment, including the implementation of closed formularies, the use of cost-effectiveness studies to guide coverage decisions, and the application of value-based pricing concepts. Given the evolution of cancer therapeutics, it may be time to evaluate the benefits and challenges of cancer coverage mandates. (shrink)

We examine whether gender-diverse boards prioritize product market concerns over capital market incentives when proprietary costs are high. We argue that gender-diverse boards protect their firm’s competitive edge and maximize long-term shareholder wealth by ethically and carefully maintaining the confidentiality of proprietary information. Due to the reduced disclosure of proprietary information, firms with gender-diverse boards are likely to face more adverse selection when proprietary costs are high. However, the reduced disclosure of proprietary information enables firms with gender-diverse boards to enhance (...) and maintain their competitive edge and gain higher long-term returns. Using a matched sample of the United States-listed companies, we find that firms with gender-diverse boards, relative to similar firms with all-male boards, (1) are associated with higher adverse selection costs and (2) higher long-run stock returns when the firm faces high product market competition. Collectively, our results suggest that firms with gender-diverse boards, which initially experience higher adverse selection in a competitive environment, are rewarded with a net gain of about 10 percent of their stock price in three years. Our research contributes to the literature by highlighting the importance of board gender diversity in fostering the ethical redaction of proprietary information for proprietary cost-based motives as opposed to agency cost-based motives. Our findings have important implications for regulators, firms, and shareholders by identifying gender-diverse boards as an antecedent for the ethical redaction of proprietary information. (shrink)

[Abstract and PDF at the Pittsburgh PhilSci Archive] A slightly shorter version of this paper is to appear in a volume edited by Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent, David Wallace and Simon Saunders, containing papers presented at the Everett@50 conference in Oxford in July 2007, and the Many Worlds@50 meeting at the Perimeter Institute in September 2007. The paper is based on my talk at the latter meeting (audio, video and slides of which are accessible here).

[Abstract and PDF at the Pittsburgh PhilSci Archive] A slightly shorter version of this paper is to appear in a volume edited by Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent, David Wallace and Simon Saunders, containing papers presented at the Everett@50 conference in Oxford in July 2007, and the Many Worlds@50 meeting at the Perimeter Institute in September 2007. The paper is based on my talk at the latter meeting (audio, video and slides of which are accessible here).

Essays in the Philosophy of Religion Based on the Sarum Lectures 1971.

In this paper I argue for the superiority of a critical realist understanding of interdisciplinarity over a mainstream understanding of it. I begin by exploring the reasons for the failure of mainstream researchers to achieve interdisciplinarity. My main argument is that mainstream interdisciplinary researchers tend to hypostatize facts, fetishize constant conjunctions of events and apply to open systems an epistemology designed for closed systems. I also explain how mainstream interdisciplinarity supports oppression and gross inequality. I argue that mainstream interdisciplinarity is (...) not true interdisciplinarity and refer to it accordingly as ‘condisciplinarity’. By way of example, I examine the condisciplinarity of the World Health Organization’s ecological model applied to the issue of men’s violence against women. Specifically, I argue that critical realist interdisciplinarity is preferable because it acknowledges inter alia the empirical, actual and real layers of reality, which allows it to develop depth-explanations of phenomena. In practice, this means that critical realist interdisciplinarity can potentially provide explanations that, compared to condisciplinarity, are broader (include more of the human and non-human context) and deeper (include for example individuals’ conscious and unconscious psychological motivations). In the World Health Organization’s example of the causes of men’s violence against women, condisciplinarity resulted in the absence of historical, global and unconscious aspects of the problem. It is also restricted the analysis to reductive, constant-conjunction based theories of the causes of the problem, specifically ‘risk factors’, thereby providing a relatively shallow explanation for the problem. (shrink)

The objective of this study was to assess whether, and how, the attitudes towards business ethics of former South African business students have changed between the early 1990s and 2010. The study used the Attitudes Toward Business Ethics Questionnaire and applied a comparative analysis between leading business schools in South Africa. The findings of this study found a significant change in attitudes based on a set time frame, with a trend towards stronger opinions on business ethics and espoused values. Eleven (...) factors came out as fundamental, although they were less able to explain the variation in the attitudes than the previous study. A significant change in the rankings of variables was noted and indicated a shift in attitude toward a teleological moral philosophy as well as utilitarian motives. This shows a clear trend towards compliance-based ethics, which can be explained by the proliferation of business legislation and regulation in the wake of recent corporate governance failures and the subsequent global financial crisis. (shrink)

There are grave issues with how the U.K. government approaches the issue of wellbeing. Specifically, policy interventions that might improve the material conditions of citizens are being down-played, and at times out-rightly dismissed. Instead, an individualist, instrumental message is being promoted, namely, that the best way to improve wellbeing is by improving individual happiness and mental health. I argue that this instrumental message – which in practice blames the victims for their lack of happiness and removes state responsibility – can (...) be made to sound feasible because of a reliance on positivist-based research, whether obtained objectively or subjectively. In this paper, I therefore detail the failings of mainstream wellbeing research and its policy conclusions, and argue that critical realism offers solutions. (shrink)

Introduction: Schools have become a primary setting for providing mental health care to youths in the U.S. School-based interventions have proliferated, but their effects on mental health and academic outcomes remain understudied. In this study we will implement and evaluate the effects of a flexible multidiagnostic treatment called Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, or Conduct Problems on students' mental health and academic outcomes.Methods and Analysis: This is an assessor-blind randomized controlled effectiveness trial conducted across five (...) school districts. School clinicians are randomized to either MATCH or usual care treatment conditions. The target sample includes 168 youths referred for mental health services and presenting with elevated symptoms of anxiety, depression, trauma, and/or conduct problems. Clinicians randomly assigned to MATCH or UC treat the youths who are assigned to them through normal school referral procedures. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of MATCH compared to UC on youths' mental health and school related outcomes and assess whether changes in school outcomes are mediated by changes in youth mental health.Ethics and Dissemination: This study was approved by the Harvard University Institutional Review Board. We plan to publish the findings in peer-reviewed journals and present them at academic conferences.Clinical Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02877875. Registered on August 24, 2016. (shrink)