Professor Blumstein's timely article deals with two competing paradigms that provide the poles in the spectrum of legal liability regimes. The "professional" or "scientific" model of liability assumes a rigidly normative approach to medical practice while the second more recent paradigm reflects the principles of marketplace economics in considering cost and resource availability to determine q...

The paper argues that the notion of Pareto efficiency builds on two normative assumptions: the more general consequentialist norm of any efficiency criterion, and the strong no-harm principle of the prohibition of any redistribution during the economic process that hurts at least one person. These normative concerns lead to a constrained and static notion of efficiency in mainstream economics, ...

Normative conclusions in economics are usually based upon a set of assumptions which are untenable in the health sector. Persistence with these assumptions highlights a more fundamental problem: the epistemology of normative economics—the methodology for drawing conclusions with respect to the improvement of social well-being—is itself flawed. Orthodox economics does not include a process for s...

We study coordination frictions, and the importance of contribution norms, in step-level public good games with large equilibrium sets and heterogeneous agents. We show that heterogeneity creates frictions on aggregate. An elicitation task and a questionnaire show that individuals hold, and expect others to hold, well defined yet conflicting normative views of fair contribution rules related to...

Despite relevant insights from socio-economics, little research in multiagent systems has addressed the interconnections between trust and normative notions such as contracts and sanctions. Focusing our attention on scenarios of betrayal, in this paper we combine the use of trust and sanctions in a negotiation process. We describe a scenario of dyadic relationships between truster agents, which...