Nanoethics is a contentious field for several reasons. Some believe it should not be recognized as a proper area of study, because they believe that nanotechnology itself is not a true category but rather an amalgamation of other sciences, such as chemistry, physics, and engineering. Critics also allege that nanoethics does not raise any new issues but rather revisits familiar ones such as priv...

Research in sociology and ethics suggests that individuals adhere to social norms of behavior established by their peers. Within an agency framework, we model endogenous social norms by assuming that each agent’s cost of implementing an action depends on the social norm for that action, defined to be the average level of that action chosen by the agent’s peer group. We show how endogenous socia...