Cooperation in groups often requires individual members to make costly contributions that benefit the group as a whole. Prior research suggests shared norms can help support ingroup cooperation by prescribing common standards of how much contribute. These may be disrupted when undergo membership change, i.e., from outgroups enter ingroup. When newcomers and incumbents have different notions abo...

Eli Hirsch argues that certain ontological disputes involve a conflict between “equivalent” languages, and the principle of charity compels each disputant to interpret other as speaking truly in their own language. For Hirsch, language's semantics maps sentences (in context) onto sets possible worlds but assigns no role reference. I argue this method leads an overly uncharitable portrayal at is...

Data from a unique monetary ‘experiment’ conducted in the UK during the period 1994-97 are used to investigate the cost of political intervention in monetary policy. The paper finds that the difference between government bond yields in Germany (but not the US) and the UK was systematically related to an index of the credibility of monetary policy constructed on the basis of the frequency of agr...

This article is one of several in this special double-issue that reports the views of “users” of IPCC reports. I am a user in the sense that I advise the policy-making community and rely on the IPCC reports to provide me with authoritative views on the state of the science. My principal recommendation for making the IPCC more helpful to the policymaking community is to strive in the Fifth Asses...