Everyone realizes the importance of social norms as guides to behavior and substitutes for law, but coming up with a paradigm for analyzing norms has been surprisingly difficult, as has systematic empirical study. In this chapter we survey the topic.

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Welfare economics relies on consequentialism even though many philosophers have questioned this assumption. Survey evidence, based on a representative sample in Sweden, is presented here suggesting that most people’s ethical perceptions are consistent with consequentialism.

Consumer choices are increasingly mediated by algorithms, which use data on those past choices to infer consumer preferences and then curate future choice sets. Behavioral economics suggests one reason these algorithms so often fail: choices can systematically deviate from preferences. For...