Explore the vast range of titles available.

Saving as many lives as possible while ensuring equity for vulnerable groups through access to triage resources has been the dominant position since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. However, the exact relationship between the principles of social justice and efficiency remains a controversial and unresolved issue. In this paper, we aim to systematically distinguish between different models of this relationship and show that conceptualizing social justice as a ‘moral side-constraint’ or adopting a ‘balancing approach’ that attempt to reconcile social justice with efficiency inevitably lead to significant moral costs that require further justification. Based on this discussion, we propose a novel “threshold model” for trading-off moral costs. According to this model, the structural impact of triage must be considered in order to determine whether one opts for triage with the primary aim of efficiency or social justice. This contextualization further explains why, in some societies and circumstances, social justice can rightly be seen as the primary concern, while in other societies and circumstances, efficiency can be defended as the primary concern.

Corruption often involves bribery, when a briber suborns a power-holder to gain advantages usually at a cost of moral transgression. Despite its wide presence in human societies, the neurocomputational basis of bribery remains elusive. Here, using model-based fMRI, we investigated the neural substrates of how a power-holder decides to accept or reject a bribe. Power-holders considered two types of moral cost brought by taking bribes: the cost of conniving with a fraudulent briber, encoded in the anterior insula, and the harm brought to a third party, represented in the right temporoparietal junction. These moral costs were integrated into a value signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was selectively engaged to guide anti-corrupt behaviors when a third party would be harmed. Multivariate and connectivity analyses further explored how these neural processes depend on individual differences. These findings advance our understanding of the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying corrupt behaviors.

This paper begins by contrasting the caricatures 'homo and femina economicus' with 'homo and femina realitus'. Against this backdrop, the paper considers three 'apparently falsified' empirical predictions of the standard expected utility model of individual decision-making concerning participation in fiscal crimes: that tax evasion and benefit fraud can be treated identically; fiscal crimes should be endemic; and that all individuals, depending on parameter values, should be either honest or dishonest. A utility function relating to decisions with a moral dimension is used to offer insight into the rationalization of the predictions and involves defining an individual's 'optimal honesty' in the context of fiscal crimes. The policy implications of the approach are briefly explored.

Medicine, Money and Morals explores physicians’ financial conflicts of interest. These conflicts are described and explained with details of how they have changed overtime and how professionals and society have addressed them in the past. Parallels are drawn with conflicts of interest in other professions including lawyers, public officials, and financial advisors. It is shown that these problems are getting worse and how they affect patients, society in general, and the doctors themselves. Based on his own experience as a health lawyer, along with investigative reporting and a careful study of health ethics, law and policy, the author reveals the full dimensions of the problem. This controversial book will be of interest to all physicians, public health officials, and medical ethicists as well as patients themselves. become a health policy issue. This book explains what these conflicts of interest are, how they have changed over the past century, what the organized medical profession has done about them in the past and how these problems are dealt with now by physicians and society. It also shows how such problems are dealt with in other fields and what options society has in trying to address these issues in the future.

The concept of voluntariness permeates the ethics and politics of migration and is commonly used to distinguish refugees from migrants. Yet, neither the precise nature and conditions of voluntariness nor its ethical significance for migrant rights and state obligations has received enough attention. The articles in this collection move the debate forward by demonstrating the complex ethical judgments involved in delineating voluntary from forced migration and in drawing out its political and institutional implications. In addition to highlighting the interplay between the voluntary and nonvoluntary elements of migration over time and across different sites of the migration journey, they provide a nuanced account of the various conditions of voluntariness and they challenge common ideas about its normative political consequences.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that intermediaries are ubiquitous in corrupt activities; however, empirical evidence on their role as facilitators of corrupt transactions is scarce. This paper asks whether intermediaries facilitate corruption by reducing the moral or psychological costs of possible bribers and bribees. We designed bribery lab experiment that simulates petty corruption transactions between private citizens and public officials. The experimental data confirm that intermediaries lower the moral costs of citizens and officials and, thus, increase corruption. Our results have implications with respect to possible anti-corruption policies targeting the legitimacy of the use of intermediaries for the provision of government services.

In this paper, I argue that the “expanded” economic theory advocated in Calabresi’s book “The Future of Law and Economics” could be interpreted in at least three different ways, all of which are compatible. First, Calabresi’s book could be interpreted as an attempt to incentivize lawyer-economists to explore laws and regulations from different angles or perspectives rather than merely apply neoclassical theories. Second, it could be considered an attempt to justify the introduction of the notion of moral costs into law and economics to better explain some legal realities. Third, it could be considered an attempt to advocate, in a more normative way, the need to incorporate moral costs into real world analysis to better improve upon decision making. This paper will address and discuss each of these possible interpretations. It will be clear that, from an epistemological point of view, if the first interpretation might be more widely accepted because it is less controversial, the second and third interpretations remain more problematic. Admittedly, the concept of moral costs could obscure and even distort our understanding of some legal realities. Moreover, the introduction of such costs for decision making is raising questions which cannot be answered through economic theory alone.

Abstract We examine the educative role played by parents in social norm transmission. Using a field experiment, we study whether parents enforce and comply more with norms when their children are present compared to when they are not. We compare similar parents when or after they drop off or pick up their children at school. We find that parents accompanying children, in contrast to parents alone, are more likely to punish norm violators and to provide help to strangers when there is no violation. They also tend to substitute more direct punishment with withholding help as a means of indirect punishment.

The purpose of this study was to examine how consumers’ public service motivation (PSM) is related to ethical consumption behaviors and how past experience of unethical behavior can reduce the impact of PSM on ethical consumer behaviors. A nationally representative sample from South Korea was used to explore how PSM influences willingness to purchase fashion counterfeits and how the impact of PSM differs for those with and without past experience buying fashion counterfeits. Higher PSM was associated with less willingness to buy counterfeits. Past experience buying counterfeits was associated with greater willingness to buy counterfeits. Past experience buying counterfeits intervened between the impact of PSM and willingness to buy counterfeits such that the impact of PSM was weakened.

This article makes a bridge between the theory of optimal auditing and the scoring methodology in an asymmetric information setting. Our application is meant for insurance claims fraud, but it can be applied to many other activities that use the scoring approach. Fraud signals are classified based on the degree to which they reveal an increasing probability of fraud. We show that the optimal auditing strategy takes the form of a \"red flags strategy,\" which consists in referring claims to a special investigative unit (SIU) when certain fraud indicators are observed. The auditing policy acts as a deterrence device, and we explain why it requires the commitment of the insurer and how it should affect the incentives of SIU staffs. The characterization of the optimal auditing strategy is robust to some degree of signal manipulation by defrauders as well as to the imperfect information of defrauders about the audit frequency. The model is calibrated with data from a large European insurance company. We show that it is possible to improve our results by separating different groups of insureds with different moral costs of fraud. Finally, our results indicate how the deterrence effect of the audit scheme can be taken into account and how it affects the optimal auditing strategy.