This thesis studies two strategies that households may use to keep their consumption smooth in the face of fluctuations in income and expenses: credit (borrowing and savings) and insurance (statecontingent transfers between households). The first chapter asks why insurance among households in rural Thai villages is incomplete. The second chapter analyzes the impacts of micro-credit. The third c...

The Lockhart Committee was appointed by the federal government in 2005 to review the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 (Cth) and the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002 (Cth). The issues in the review are ones on which community views differ widely and many people hold strong and diverging opinions. Yet all members of the committee were able to agree on their recommendations when the ...

BACKGROUND The phenomenon of moral distress among nurses has been described in a variety of high-income countries and practice settings. Defined as the biopsychosocial, cognitive, and behavioural effects experienced by clinicians when their values are compromised by internal or external constraints, it results from the inability to provide the desired care to patients. No research has been repo...

BACKGROUND Medical professionalism as a set of behaviours that transcends personal values, beliefs and attitudes to incorporate ethical and moral principles is considered a covenant between society and the practice of medicine. The Bachelor of Clinical Medical Practice (BCMP) a three year professional degree was launched at the University of the Witwatersrand in January 2009 in response to a do...

When "pyromania" from 1840-1890 is reviewed, it stands out as a concept that at first found favor in an era of moral insanity and moral treatment. During this period pyromania was variously labeled as a form of monomania, moral insanity, impulsive mania, or instinctive mania. As early as 1850, and clearly after the Civil War, however, controversial arguments regarding the locus of personal resp...

We conduct a two-stage game experiment with a non-excludable public good. In the first stage, two subjects choose simultaneously whether or not they commit to contributing nothing to provide a pure public good. In the second stage, knowing the other subject’s commitment decision, subjects who did not commit in the first stage choose contributions to the public good. We found no support for the ...

In this paper we describe an approach to the problem of weighting various factors that contribute to an analysis or outcome of a problem situation and discuss issues about weighting as they touch upon our case-based reasoned HY@O. In HYPO, we take the approach of delaying for as long as possible any assignment of weights-and of symbolically comparing the “weights” of competing factors. We call ...

Many violent relationships are characterized by a high degree of cyclicality: women who are the victims of domestic violence often leave and return multiple times. To explain this we develop a model of time inconsistent preferences in the context of domestic violence. This time inconsistency generates a demand for commitment. We present supporting evidence that women in violent relationships di...

We consider the related notions of two-prover and of relativistic commitment schemes. In recent work, Lunghi et al. proposed a new relativistic commitment scheme with a multi-round sustain phase that keeps the binding property alive as long as the sustain phase is running. They prove security of their scheme against classical attacks; however, the proven bound on the error parameter is very wea...

Negotiations often take time, thereby delaying the implementation of agreements which are to the mutual advantage of the bargaining partners. If the negotiators are all impatient, then these delayed agreements must be inefficient, as all participants must strictly prefer an immediate agreement on the same terms. The inefficiency of delayed agreements poses an important explanatory question: Why...