Recent Submissions

  • Colin Mayer: Firm Commitment 

    Ziegler, Moritz (2014)
  • Ordering Anarchy 

    Thrasher, John (2014)
    Ordered social life requires rules of conduct that help generate and preserve peaceful and cooperative interactions among individuals. The problem is that these social rules impose costs. They prohibit us from doing some ...
  • Children’s Rights with Endogenous Fertility 

    Taylor, Brad R. (2014)
    This paper uses hypothetical contractarianism to consider the value of children's rights laws as a means of protecting children. Laws protecting children from their parents have the unintended but predictable consequence ...
  • Hume’s Theory of Justice 

    Spector, Horacio (2014)
    Hume developed an original and revolutionary theoretical paradigm for explaining the spontaneous emergence of the classic conventions of justice-stable possession, transference of property by consent, and the obligation ...
  • You Are Not Worth the Risk: Lawful Discrimination in Hiring 

    Scholes, Vanessa (2014)
    Increasing empirical research on productivity supports the use of statistical or `rational' discrimination in hiring. The practice is legal for features of job applicants not covered by human rights discrimination laws, ...
  • Anarchy, State, and Property 

    Lindblom, Lars (2014)
    The fundamental function of the state is safeguarding the safety of its citizens. The combination of Nozick's invisible hand explanation with his theory of justice implies that individuals can have full private property ...
  • Social Yes; Contract No 

    Hardin, Russell (2014)
    Social contract theory is incoherent and it does not work as desired. Among the most obvious disanalogies is that contracts are enforced by a third party, commonly the state. There is no such external enforcer for a ...
  • Expanding the Nudge: Designing Choice Contexts and Choice Contents 

    Grill, Kalle (2014)
    To nudge is to design choice contexts in order to improve choice outcomes. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein emphatically endorse nudging but reject more restrictive means. In contrast, I argue that the behavioral psychology ...
  • Consent as the Foundation of Political Authority - A Lockean Perspective 

    Dietrich, Frank (2014)
    The article focuses on the justification provided by classical contract theory for the right of states to enact laws and the corresponding obligation of political allegiance. At first the distinction between political ...
  • Preference and Similarity between Alternatives 

    Binder, Constanze (2014)
    We discuss how information about choice-relevant differences between alternatives can be revealed from preference information. We provide axiomatic characterisations of two classes of Similarity Revelation Rules: one that ...