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Stakeholder theory usually focuses on the moral responsibility of corporations towards their stakeholders. This article takes the reverse perspective to shed light on the moral responsibility of stakeholders—specifically, investors or 'financiers'. It explicates a distinction between two types of financiers, creditors and shareholders. Many intuitively judge that shareholders have greater or more extensive moral responsibility for the actions of the corporations they invest in than do bondholders and other creditors. Examining the merits of possible arguments for or against treating owners and creditors differently elucidates which arguments can support the moral duties of investors generally, and different duties for different groups of investors specifically. The paper considers three possible lines of arguments, rooting investors' responsibility, respectively, in how they enable corporate conduct, how they benefit from it, and to what extent they are complicit in it. The paper argues that a notion of complicity is the only tenable ground for holding investors liable; sketches an account of complicity based on the recent philosophical literature on collective intention and collective action; and concludes that shareholders but not creditors can generally be seen as complicit on this account.

Despite a widespread trend toward the adoption of increasingly participatory approaches to political decision making in developing countries, there is little or no evidence that these practices in fact return the benefits attributed to them. This article investigates one specific worry—that participatory decision-making processes may be vulnerable to manipulation by elites. The authors report on a field experiment, drawing on a unique nationwide experiment in democratic deliberation in São Tomé and Príncipe in which the discussion leaders were randomly assigned across meetings. The randomization procedure provides a rare opportunity to identify the impact of leaders on the outcomes of group deliberations. They find that leader effects were extremely large, in many cases accounting for over one-third of all variation in the outcomes of the national discussions. These results have important implications for the design of such deliberative practices. While the total effect of leadership cannot be assessed, it may still be possible to observe when leader influence occurs and to correct for leader effects in comparisons of outcomes across deliberations.

Conventional economic theory assumes that people care only about ultimate outcomes and are indifferent to the decision and allocation processes by which outcomes are brought about. Building on Sen (1997), I relax this assumption, and investigate the formal and philosophical issues that arise. I extend the formal apparatus of preference theory to analyse how processes may enter preferences, and investigate whether traditional invariance requirements like the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference are still satisfied in this new setting. I show that it is, provided certain conditions of separability hold, and I discuss the plausibility of these conditions. Further, I argue that processes are often valued in a mode that diverges from the conventional modes of instrumental and intrinsic/independent valuation. I introduce the notion of dependent non-instrumental valuation, and show how processes could depend on their instrumental function for their value – making their value dependent – and yet derive their value from something else – making it non-instrumental. Dependent non-instrumental value, I argue, can be explained by symbolic and evidential relations between processes and outcomes.

Publication of robust, transparent, and valid indices of health system performance could lead to greater political accountability and to evidence-based health policies. To this end, the World Health Organization recently published indices of health system performance for its 191 member states.

Much work in social choice theory takes individual preferences as uninvestigated inputs into aggregation functions designed to reflect considerations of fairness. Advances in experimental and behavioural economics show that fairness can also be an important motivation in the preferences of individuals themselves. A proper characterisation of how fairness concerns enter such preferences can enrich the informational basis of many social choice exercises. This paper proposes axiomatic foundations for individual fairness-motivated preferences that cover most of the models developed to rationalise observed behaviour in experiments. These models fall into two classes: Outcome-based models, which see preferences as defined only over distributive outcomes, and context-dependent models, which allow rankings over distributive outcomes to change systematically with non-outcome factors. I accommodate outcome-based and context-sensitive fairness concerns by modelling fairness-motivated preferences as a reference-dependent preference structure. I first present a set of axioms and two theorems that generate commonly used outcome-based models as special cases. I then generalise the axiomatic basis to allow for referencedependence, and derive a simple functional form in which the weight on each person's payoff depends on a reference vector of how much each person deserves.

Workers in most manual service jobs-hospitality and tourism, delivery, retail, and basic care-had long been getting a rougher deal, which worsened in the pandemic. Because they require physical proximity, these are the jobs most exposed to either lockdowns (when judged nonessential) or contagion (when essential). [...]the growth of a \"precariat\" of service workers-those with insecure employment and income and ill served by public services-is a principal reason why shockingly many people in the world's richest countries have exceedingly thin financial buffers. Workers in sectors relying on low-paid and precarious work, hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic, were also less equipped to absorb such a shock to begin with. [...]even unprecedented government steps to protect incomes have generally been insufficient to offset the disproportionate damage to those already worse off. [...]the pandemic is likely not only to have reinforced chronic economic polarization, but to have intensified public awareness of it as a problem.