Economics and Philosophy最新文献

{"title":"A social-status rationale for repugnant market transactions","authors":"Patrick Harless, Romans Pancs","doi":"10.1017/s0266267122000335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266267122000335","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Individuals often deem market transactions in sex, human organs and surrogacy, among others, repugnant. Repugnance norms can be explained by appealing to social-status concerns. We study an exchange economy in which agents abhor consumption dominance: one’s social status is compromised if one consumes less of every good than someone else does. Dominance may be forestalled by partitioning goods into submarkets and then invoking the repugnance norms that proscribe trade across these submarkets. Dominance may also be forestalled if individuals strategically ‘overconsume’ some goods, interpreted as emergent status goods. When equilibria are multiple, there is scope for welfare-enhancing policies that coordinate on status goods.","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42153249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Market nudges and autonomy","authors":"Viktor Ivanković, Bart Engelen","doi":"10.1017/s0266267122000347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266267122000347","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Behavioural techniques or ‘nudges’ can be used for various purposes. In this paper, we shift the focus from government nudges to nudges used by for-profit market agents. We argue that potential worries about nudges circumventing the deliberative capacities or diminishing the control of targeted agents are greater when it comes to market nudges, given that these (1) are not constrained by the principles that regulate government nudges (mildness, sensitivity to people’s interests and public justifiability) and (2) are often ‘stacked’ – they come in great numbers that overwhelm agents. In addition, we respond to possible objections and derive several policy suggestions.","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45218997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Preferences versus opportunities: on the conceptual foundations of normative welfare economics","authors":"Roberto Fumagalli","doi":"10.1017/s0266267122000323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266267122000323","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Normative welfare economics commonly assumes that individuals’ preferences can be reliably inferred from their choices and relies on preference satisfaction as the normative standard for welfare. In recent years, several authors have criticized welfare economists’ reliance on preference satisfaction as the normative standard for welfare and have advocated grounding normative welfare economics on opportunities rather than preferences. In this paper, I argue that although preference-based approaches to normative welfare economics face significant conceptual and practical challenges, opportunity-based approaches fail to provide a more reliable and informative foundation for normative welfare economics than preference-based approaches. I then identify and rebut various influential calls to ground normative welfare economics on opportunities rather than preferences to support my qualified defence of preference-based approaches.","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47334135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Happiness – Concept, Measurement and Promotion, Yew-Kwang Ng, Springer, 2022, v + 183 pages.","authors":"Willem van der Deijl","doi":"10.1017/S0266267122000281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267122000281","url":null,"abstract":"One of my first encounters with a work of philosophy was John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. I found it greatly inspiring. Mill’s utilitarianism involves an attention to those suffering, but has a positive outlook at the same time. When I developed in my studies, I was quite surprised to find that, while this may be changing these days, in both economics and philosophy, utilitarianism has few adherents. Interestingly, this is mostly for different reasons. Following Robbins (1932), economists abandoned the idea that we should think of the human good in terms of psychological properties, such as pleasure or happiness. Measuring these properties appeared impossible, or at least, not sufficiently scientific. Philosophers, on the other hand, were concerned about the reduction of all value to happiness, and to pleasure in particular. Robert Nozick’s (1974) wellknown thought experiment of the experience machine – a machine in which someone could have the experience of doing wonderful things without actually doing them – convinced many that pleasure (and happiness) is not all that there is to living a good life. Moreover, should we really aim to maximize welfare? A racist society built on the labours of a small racial minority could be maximizing its overall happiness, but is surely morally abhorrent. Or so the argument typically goes. Defenders of utilitarianism have become rare, in both fields, though there are of course influential utilitarian philosophers, such as Peter Singer, and various common practices in applied cost–benefit analysis keep an apparent utilitarian flare. Now utilitarianism is back. In particular the effective altruism movement has attracted much enthusiasm, evidenced by the Time Magazine cover of August 2022 for instance, dedicated to the effective altruists. The relationship between effective altruism and utilitarianism, and utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer in particular, is strong. In addition to this, we also find a new enthusiasm for research on happiness in economics and psychology, a research programme that often takes on a utilitarian flavour (Kahneman et al. 1997; Veenhoven 2004). Kew-Kwang Ng, however, was a utilitarian before it was cool. He is among the small group of thinkers who have been resisting the forceful pushes against utilitarianism for decades. Ng has, throughout his career, played a remarkable role in a variety of discussions about many different facets of utilitarianism. Writing in both economics and philosophy journals, he has contributed to utilitarian thought, and defended it unapologetically. Happiness – Concept, Measurement, and Promotion is a concise, but systematic defence of utilitarianism, and an insightful discussion of its implications. It contains 16 chapters that can,","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":"39 1","pages":"170 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45891480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Is luxury tax justifiable?","authors":"Hyunseop Kim","doi":"10.1017/s026626712200030x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s026626712200030x","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper examines whether, and if so when, luxury tax is justifiable. After a characterization of luxury tax, I critically examine several arguments that have been or can be made in defence of luxury tax, including Ng’s diamond good argument and a variation of Frank’s positional good argument. I put forward an alternative, expressive argument, according to which luxury tax can help to create and sustain social norms that discourage conspicuous luxury consumption and display of wealth. I explain several ways in which luxury tax fails to achieve the expressive goal and brings about unintended consequences.","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43881009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Impartiality and democracy: an objection to political exchange","authors":"Matthew T. Jeffers","doi":"10.1017/s0266267122000293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266267122000293","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The philosophical debate concerning political exchange has largely been confined to debating the desirability of vote trading; where individuals can sell their votes or buy votes from others. However, I show that the vote credit systems prevalent in public choice theory entirely avoid the common objections to political exchange that afflict vote trading proposals. Namely, vote credit systems avoid equality concerns and inalienability concerns. I offer an alternative critique to formal mechanisms that encourage political exchange by drawing on the role that impartiality and impartial moral judgements play in democratic and electoral institutions.","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44329240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Team reasoning cannot be viewed as a payoff transformation","authors":"A. Colman","doi":"10.1017/s026626712200027x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s026626712200027x","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In a recent article in this journal, Duijf claims to have proved that team reasoning can be viewed as a payoff transformation. His formalization mimics team reasoning but ignores its essential agency switch. The possibility of such a payoff transformation was never in doubt, does not imply that team reasoning can be viewed as a payoff transformation, and makes no sense in a game in which payoffs represent players’ utilities. A theorem is proved here that a simpler and more intuitive payoff transformation can mimic any theory that predicts what strategies players will choose in a well-defined game.","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44606701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Welfare Diffusion Objection to Prioritarianism","authors":"Tomi Francis","doi":"10.1017/s0266267122000190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266267122000190","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 According to the Welfare Diffusion Objection, we should reject Prioritarianism because it implies the ‘desirability of welfare diffusion’: the claim that it can be better for there to be less total wellbeing spread thinly between a larger total number of people, rather than for there to be more total wellbeing, spread more generously between a smaller total number of people. I argue that while Prioritarianism does not directly imply the desirability of welfare diffusion, Prioritarians are nevertheless implicitly committed to certain principles for comparing different-number populations which, together with the Prioritarian same-person axiology, imply the desirability of welfare diffusion.","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47881591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revisiting variable-value population principles","authors":"W. Bossert, Susumu Cato, Kohei Kamaga","doi":"10.1017/s0266267122000268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266267122000268","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We examine a general class of variable-value population principles. Our particular focus is on the extent to which such principles can avoid the repugnant and sadistic conclusions. We show that if a mild limit property is imposed, avoidance of the repugnant conclusion implies the sadistic conclusion. This result generalizes earlier observations by showing that they apply to a substantially larger class of principles. Our second theorem states that, under the limit property, the axiom of mere addition also conflicts with avoidance of the repugnant conclusion. This result is a consequence of a similar observation that appears in the earlier literature.","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45487577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EAP volume 38 issue 3 Cover and Back matter","authors":"David V. Axelsen","doi":"10.1017/s0266267122000256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266267122000256","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51643,"journal":{"name":"Economics and Philosophy","volume":"38 1","pages":"b1 - b7"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49517756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}