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Schaffer and Knobe defend a form of contextualism in the face of this new threat. They acknowledge that some of the specific claims made by earlier contextualists might be undermined by recent experimental results, but suggest that a different form of contextualism--based on the idea that conversational context provides the relevant contrast--can answer this empirical challenge. They then report a new series of experimental studies that provide empirical support for a contrastive view of knowledge. The empirical data about what ordinary speakers will say suggests that intuitions are in fact sensitive to contrasts and salient error possibilities, but insensitive to stakes. They developed a contrastive model of knowledge ascriptions which predicts and explains this data.

We develop a tractable framework for the analysis of the relationship between contractual incompleteness, technological complementarities, and technology adoption. In our model, a firm chooses its technology and investment levels in contractible activities by suppliers of intermediate inputs. Suppliers then choose investments in noncontractible activities, anticipating payoffs from an ex post bargaining game. We show that greater contractual incompleteness leads to the adoption of less advanced technologies, and that the impact of contractual incompleteness is more pronounced when there is greater complementary among the intermediate inputs. We study a number of applications of the main framework and show that the mechanism proposed in the paper can generate sizable productivity differences across countries with different contracting institutions, and that differences in contracting institutions lead to endogenous comparative advantage differences.

We present an argument for revising the theory of alternatives for Scalar Implicatures and for Association with Focus. We argue that in both cases the alternatives are determined in the same way, as a contextual restriction of the focus value of the sentence, which, in turn, is defined in structure-sensitive terms. We provide evidence that contextual restriction is subject to a constraint that prevents it from discriminating between alternatives when they stand in a particular logical relationship with the assertion or the prejacent, a relationship that we refer to as symmetry. Due to this constraint on contextual restriction, discriminating between alternatives in cases of symmetry becomes the task of focus values. This conclusion is incompatible with standard type-theoretic definitions of focus values, motivating our structure-sensitive definition instead.

People are willing to punish others at a personal cost, and this apparently antisocial tendency can stabilize cooperation. What motivates humans to punish noncooperators is likely a combination of aversion to both unfair outcomes and unfair intentions. Here we report a pair of studies in which captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) did not inflict costs on conspecifics by knocking food away if the outcome alone was personally disadvantageous but did retaliate against conspecifics who actually stole the food from them. Like humans, chimpanzees retaliate against personally harmful actions, but unlike humans, they are indifferent to simply personally disadvantageous outcomes and are therefore not spiteful.

Knowledge ascriptions seem context sensitive. Yet it is widely thought that epistemic contextualism does not have a plausible semantic implementation. We aim to overcome this concern by articulating and defending an explicit contextualist semantics for 'know,' which integrates a fairly orthodox contextualist conception of knowledge as the elimination of the relevant alternatives, with a fairly orthodox \"Amherst\" semantics for A-quantification over a contextually variable domain of situations. Whatever problems epistemic contextualism might face, lack of an orthodox semantic implementation is not among them.

A seller can trade an endowment of a perfectly divisible good, the quality of which she privately knows. Buyers compete by offering menus of nonexclusive contracts, so that the seller can privately trade with several buyers. In this setting, we show that an equilibrium exists under mild conditions and that aggregate equilibrium allocations are generically unique. Although the good for sale is divisible, in equilibrium the seller ends up trading her whole endowment or not trading at all. Trades take place at a price equal to the expected quality of the good, conditional on the seller being ready to trade at that price. Our model thus provides a novel strategic foundation for Akerlof's (1970) results. It also contrasts with competitive screening models in which contracts are assumed to be exclusive, as in Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976). Latent contracts that are issued but not traded in equilibrium play an important role in our analysis.

This paper begins by reviewing research on the cognitive processing used by residential burglars when choosing targets. We then attempt to make links between this processing and the notion of expertise in the broader cognitive literature, to the extent that, in comparison with novices, processing appears removed from explicit deliberation, tasks are carried out speedily and methodically, and recognition of relevant stimuli or cues is extremely fast, if not instantaneous. We then present new data from interviews with 50 experienced burglars. We cover the initial decision to burgle and selection of the target followed by, for the first time in the UK, a detailed discussion of search strategies within the property. Forty-five out of 50 burglars had a predictable search pattern and 37 spontaneously described their searches using terms signifying automaticity—an underlying feature of expertise. We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of primary and secondary crime prevention.

This paper develops an expectancy model for Chinese-American differences in conflict-avoiding, and tests this model using a scenario study with respondents from Taiwan and the US. Our results show that a higher Chinese tendency to avoid conflict is explained by higher Chinese expectations that direct conflict will hurt the relationship with the other party, and by greater concern for the other party among Chinese. It is not, however, explained by differences in the expected career costs/benefits of good/bad relations with others. Also, Chinese are more sensitive to hierarchy than Americans, so that avoiding is heightened more for Chinese than for Americans when the other party is of higher status. Qualitative results suggest that Chinese-American differences in time frames may also explain differences in avoiding. Implications for businesses and management are suggested.

Particularists in ethics emphasize that the normative is holistic, and invite us to infer with them that it therefore defies generalization. This has been supposed to present an obstacle to traditional moral theorizing, to have striking implications for moral epistemology and moral deliberation, and to rule out reductive theories of the normative, making it a bold and important thesis across the areas of normative theory, moral epistemology, moral psychology, and normative metaphysics. Though particularists emphasize the importance of the holism of the normative, however, it is not something that they have generally been able to explain. The author shows how to use a small number of simple and independently compelling assumptions in order to both predict and explain the holistic features of the normative with respect to the non-normative. The basic idea of the paper is simple. It is that normative claims are holistic because they are general, rather than because they defy generalization.

The canonical selection contracting programme takes the agent's participation decision as deterministic and finds the optimal contract, typically satisfying this constraint for the worst type. Upon weakening this assumption of known reservation values by introducing independent randomness into the agents' outside options, we find that some of the received wisdom from mechanism design and nonlinear pricing is not robust and the richer model which allows for stochastic participation affords a more general empirical specification. We develop a multidimensional methodology for addressing this class of problems, providing two important applications to nonlinear pricing. First, with nonlinear pricing by a monopolist the familiar “nodistortion-at-the-top” result persists, but in tandem with the surprising conclusion that there is either no distortion at the bottom or bunching. Second, in a simple model of product differentiated duopolists competing with nonlinear pricing we show that, generally, the duopoly outcome is qualitatively similar to the monopoly outcome. However, when marginal costs are symmetric and competition is sufficiently intense, distortions disappear and the equilibrium outcome takes a remarkably simple form: efficient quality allocations with cost-plus-fee pricing.