Fragments of Development: Nation,Gender, and the Space of Modernity

Adam Smith argued that capitalism was best achieved when individuals temper their economic self-interests with ethically grounded motivations. Unfortunately, Smith stopped short of articulating precisely how individuals might manage these seemingly competing interests in a way that is practical for actors in modern day organizations. We believe that a set of effective principles of justice can be found in the writings of political philosopher John Rawls. We argue that due to the empirical realities of entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial context is aligned with Rawls' original position. We consider how Rawls' principles might inform founders of new organizations with regard to their interaction with organizational stakeholders.     

罗尔斯公平观视角下的美国城市更新策略研究——以亚特兰大环线再开发为例

近年来,美国一些以城市更新为导向的大型景观项目因其巨大的规模和尺度、多元的利益相关方以及所产生的积极社会效应而受到广泛关注,如纽约高线公园、亚特兰大环线。这些景观项目除关注空间设计品质外,相较传统更新实践更加重视利益分配、社会参与以及景观服务可达性等社会公平议题。基于罗尔斯公平理论的视角,系统分析了以亚特兰大环线项目为代表的美国城市更新策略,重点探讨了程序正义、重叠共识、结果正义的实现方法和形式,以期对中国当下的城市更新提供参考与借鉴。     

服务公平性各类属性之间关系的 探索性研究 ——基于旅游企业顾客的感知

服务公平性各类属性之间的关系在学术上是值得探讨的重要课题,作者以旅行社和酒店的顾客为调研对象,采用确认性因子分析、二阶因子分析以及结构方程模型分析等方法,建立模型对服务公平性各类属性之间的关系进行了探索性研究,同时检验服务公平性四类属性对顾客满意感的影响。二阶因子分析结果表明:服务公平性包括结果公平性、程序公平性、交往公平性和信息公平性四类属性;结构方程模型分析结果则表明:信息公平性影响程序公平性,程序公平性影响结果公平性和交往公平性;信息公平性、交往公平性以及结果公平性对顾客满意感均有显著的直接影响,程序公平性对顾客满意感有显著的间接影响。论文对服务公平性四类属性之间的关系进行了讨论,提出了研究结果的管理启示。     

On the Relevance of John Rawls's Theory of Justice to Welfare Economics

Mainstream microeconomic theory makes some use of John Rawls's Theory of Justicein discussing welfare economics and social welfare functionals. While various elements of his approach are usually mentioned, his basic point is generally taken to be his difference principle (maximizing the welfare of the worst off individual) applied as a decision principle for evaluating the equity of resource allocation.

To take the difference principle as the essence of Rawls's work is an error. The present paper reviews the basic argument of the Theory of Justice

compares it with the use that economists make of it, and concludes that in a number of quite specific ways Rawls's ideas are misrepresented and misused by mainstream microeconomists.     

Should Reference Alternatives in Pivot Design SC Surveys be Treated Differently?

Analysts are increasingly making use of pivot style Stated Choice (SC) data in the estimation of choice models. These datasets often contain a reference alternative whose attributes remain invariant across replications for the same respondent. This paper presents evidence to suggest that respondents react differently to the attributes of these reference alternatives and those of purely hypothetical alternatives. While some such evidence has been reported in the existing literature, this paper goes further and details a number of different departures from a common treatment of the two types of alternatives, relating both to the observed part of utility and the error term.     

A new approach to modeling decision-making under uncertainty

This paper presents two axiomatic models of decision making under uncertainty that avoid the use of a state space. The first is a subjective expected utility model with action-dependent subjective probabilities and effect-dependent preferences (the case of effect-independent preferences is obtained as a special instance). The second is a nonexpected utility model involving well-defined families of action-dependent subjective probabilities on effects and a utility representation that is not necessarily linear in these probabilities (a probabilistic sophistication version of this model, with action-dependent subjective probabilities is obtained as a special case). The hospitality of EUREQua, University of Paris 1, and financial support by the National Science Foundation grant SES-0314249 are gratefully acknowledged.     

Sen’s criticism of revealed preference theory and its ‘neo-samuelsonian critique’: a methodological and theoretical assessment

This paper evaluates how Amartya Sen’s critique of revealed preference theory (RPT) stands against the latter’s contemporary, ‘neo-Samuelsonian’ version. Neo- Samuelsonians have argued that Sen’s arguments against RPT are innocuous, in particular once it is acknowledged that RPT does not assume away the existence of motivations or other latent psychological or cognitive processes. Sen’s claims that preferences and choices need to be distinguished and that external factors need to be taken into account to analyze the act of choice then appear to be irrelevant. However, while it is true that contemporary revealed preference theory (CRPT) partially evades Sen’s critique, I show that the latter is still relevant outside the restricted areas of consumer choice and market dynamics. In particular, Sen’s views regarding the importance of incomplete preferences and the multiplicity of levels of agency can hardly be integrated into the framework of CRPT. This is a significant limit, given the imperialistic claims of some of the proponents of the latter.     

Ranking opportunity sets in a simple intertemporal framework

We extend the problem of ranking subsets (opportunity sets) of a set of alternatives to an intertemporal setting, whereby the agent makes a sequence of choice decisions over time. In particular, we show in a simple two-period model that an agent who satisfies five plausible axioms ranks opportunity sets in a lexicographic fashion. That is, the agent ranks opportunity sets based solely on the relative desirability of their first-period alternatives, and only if the first-period alternatives are thought equally desirable does the agent consider the second-period alternatives. We discuss this strong time-discounting result and the role of the axioms, and also show that the popular “independence” axioms employed in the existing “static” literature are inconsistent with some reasonable axioms regarding intertemporal choice.      

Policy Effectiveness and the Slopes of IS and LM Curves: A Graphical Analysis

In contrast to Michael Lovell's argument, this comment argues that the lack of computer-aided instruction (CAI) materials does not result from the public-good nature of educational software but from a lack of demand for CAI materials.     

Allowing disagreement in evaluations of social welfare

There is no consensus on how to measure interpersonally comparable, cardinal utility. Despite of this, people repeatedly make welfare evaluations in their everyday lives. However, people do not always agree on such evaluations, and this is one important reason for political disagreements. Thus, to keep in control of the normative premises, decision makers may prefer information which can be used as input to an arbitrary social welfare function to information which is the output from a social welfare function specified by the analyst. In this paper we try to identify and simplify sufficient welfare indicators; information which enables decision makers to arrive at welfare evaluations of social states or projects, according to their own ethical beliefs. Our conclusion is that providing factual information about different population groups, their social state, size, and characteristics, may be better for this purpose than the more traditional approach of focusing on ordinal utility information.     

Testing for rationality: the case of discrete choice data

When working with micro data on consumer demand, there are many different situations where decisions involve only discrete choices. In this context, conditions under which an underlying rational preference structure exists are derived. Moreover, by introducing flexibility into the model, it is possible to identify nonrational behavior in the sample.     

浅谈金融在促进社会公平方面应发挥的作用

金融作为现代经济的核心,对于经济增长的意义毋庸置疑。然而,金融在促进经济发展的同时也有不尽人意之处。金融是什么?金融为什么会出现?金融到底为谁服务?是越来越成为精英阶层攫取财富的工具,抑或是国家二次分配的手段,还是应该在缩小贫富差距、保护弱势群体的权利,进而促进全社会的公平、正义、和谐方面发挥应有的作用?这些都是值得思考的问题。     

A Rawlsian Defense of the Individual Mandate: The “Collective Asset” Approach

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires individuals to get coverage or pay a fine (or “shared responsibility payment”) starting in 2014. This mandate had been at the center of a contentious political and legal debate. Although the Mandate is key to ending discriminations based on pre-existing conditions in the individual insurance market, its constitutionality had been challenged. We argue that the Obama administration's legal argument for the constitutionality of the Mandate by invoking conventional economic categories such as “negative externalities” is inadequate in addressing the economic and moral significance of the Mandate. As an alternative, we suggest a Rawlsian approach. Specifically, we will borrow the Rawlsian notion of “collective asset” to articulate the moral appeal of the Mandate and its social insurance logic.     

关于生态社会公平性建设的思考--以南京为例

生态社会建设应该注重社会公平性建设，以便在尊重社会成员个体差异性的基础上，更好地发挥社会组织效能，增强社会活力，实现生态社会人与人之间的平衡。本文以南京市生态社会建设为例，进行了现有社会公平性分析，然后依据生态社会公平建设的基础条件，提出了生态社会公平建设的思考和对策。