We study how seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior on eBay are affected by an improvement in market transparency. The improvement was achieved by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings. It led to a significant increase in buyer satisfaction with seller performance, but not to an increase in seller exit. When sellers had the choice between exiting—a reduction in adverse selection—and im...

Is a sense of humour a virtue? In an informal sense of the term ‘virtue’, of course it is. A sense of humour is a trait nobody wants to be thought of as lacking, and one that we value in partners, friends and colleagues alike. But the claim that a sense of humour is a moral virtue seems far more controversial. Yet in a fascinating article, just this claim has been advanced by Robert C. Roberts,...

Housing finance is a nontraditional field where actuarial expertise could be applied fruitfully. The development of mortgage instruments requires the application of financial mathematics, while the evaluation and management of the financial risks to which borrowers and lenders are exposed require a knowledge of insurance principles. This paper splits the financial costs of home ownership into s...

While a considerable amount of research is done in the field of moral psychology, to our best knowledge, no systematic study of moral judgments made by professional groups who make moral decisions as part of their occupational duties exists (e.g. firefighters, medical doctors, midwives, police officers). By their training and practice, such professionals are expected to exhibit differences in m...

Computational models of moral cognition will be critical to the creation of agents and robots that operate autonomously in morally sensitive and complex domains. We propose a framework for developing computational models of moral cognition based on behavioral and neurobiological experimental results and field observations. Specifically, we discuss the following critical issues in building such ...

Article history: Received 26 October 2012 Available online 23 October 2015 JEL classification: J41 J24 D21

Preference-aggregation problems arise in various contexts. One such context, little explored by social choice theorists, is metaethical. ‘Idealadvisor’ accounts, which have played a major role in metaethics, propose that moral facts are constituted by the idealized preferences of a community of advisors. Such accounts give rise to a preference-aggregation problem: namely, aggregating the adviso...