This note focuses on the design of prevention programmes and the role of tort law regarding the control of risky activities, associated with unknown or imperfectly known risks, such as innovation or (long term) environmental damages. Together with the existence of perception bias on the side of...

We model the safety net problem as a social dilemma game involving moral hazard, risk taking and limited liability. The safety net game is compared to both an individual decision task involving full liability and the deterministic public goods game. We report experimental data to show that...

In this essay I argue that one can understand the relationship between those who rule and those who are ruled in civil society as an implicit contractual relationship or contract by convention. I use variations of the extensive form Trust Game to summarize the structures of alternative forms of...

The recent renaissance of work on conventions, informal institutions, and social norms has reminded us that between the state and individual choice is a network of informal social rules that are the foundation of our cooperative social life. However, even those who appreciate the importance of...

I argue that social-contract theory cannot succeed because reasonable people may always disagree, and that social-contract theory is irrelevant to the problem of the legitimacy of a form of government or of a system of moral rules. I note the weakness of the appeal to implicit agreement, the...

I defend the claim, made in a previous paper, that ‘a Humean can be a contractarian’, against the criticisms of Anthony de Jasay. Jasay makes a categorical distinction between ‘ordered anarchy’ (which he associates with Hume) and ‘social contract theory’. I argue that Hume’s...

Most meta-ethical theories fail either for lack of real content or because they fail to make needed distinctions, or to give sufficient account of what a moral theory is about. Positing that values are intuited is useless or worse, since the very problem that gives rise to the need for morals is...

This experimental study examines variations in the opportunity cost of conservation (the foregone private earnings from appropriation) in two linear appropriation games that include symmetric and asymmetric subject payoffs. In the first game, appropriation leads to deterministic degradation in...

The security necessary for investment and income growth is difficult to establish in areas where the government is weak. A prescriptive political objective for unstable countries is to strengthen the government’s ability to make credible commitments to establish security. We model the...

This paper examines a voluntarily provided common-property resource (CPR) in settings that vary the rules used for allocating the resource to providers. Three allocation mechanisms are investigated: “allocator,” “tremble,” and “egalitarian.” The allocator mechanism, based on...