The AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) has initiated an important discussion on medical professionalism and the use of social media by issuing thoughtful and practical guidance for physicians and medical students. The implications of online activities for trust in the profession, as well as for trust between patient and doctor, however, will need further exploration as digital l...

This paper reconstructs the evolutionary path of the contract of employment in English law. It demonstrates that the contract of employment is a more recent innovation than is widely thought, and that its essential features owe as much to legislation as they do to the common law of contract. The master-servant model of the nineteenth century was only displaced by the modern contract of employme...

The paper examines social security (public pension) reforms in which the programme is partially shifted from a public unfunded basis to a private, prefunded, basis. It focuses on reforms where individuals have a choice in switching from public funded to private unfunded programmes (as in the ‘contracting out’ scheme in the UK), or where some individuals are forced to join the funded scheme, or ...

In this paper, we examine the effects of introducing actuarially fair annuity markets into an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth. We find the complete annuitization of agents’ wealth is not, in general, dynamically optimal; that the degree of annuitization that is dynamically optimal depends nonmonotonically on the expected length of retirement and on the pay-as-you-go social se...

Baron-Cohen (1995) proposed that the theory of mind (ToM) inference system evolved to promote strategic social interaction. Social exchange--a form of co-operation for mutual benefit--involves strategic social interaction and requires ToM inferences about the contents of other individuals' mental states, especially their desires, goals, and intentions. There are behavioral and neuropsychologica...

In this paper we present a fairly complex example of how the social model for agent conversations based on social commitments we have developed in the past formally supports the implementation of conversations for the Contract Net Protocol.

I discuss the predicament that engineering-ethics education in Japan now faces and propose a solution to this. The predicament is professional motivation, i.e., the problem of how to motivate engineering students to maintain their professional integrity. The special professional responsibilities of engineers are often explained either as an implicit social contract between the profession and so...

We explore the relationship between education, earnings and fixed-term contracts using data from the 1997 British Social Attitudes Survey and the 1997 International Social Survey Programme . We find that workers employed under such contracts earn significantly lower wages than their ‘permanent’ contract counterparts, even after controlling for a plethora of personal and job characteristics. Thi...

The governance of IT outsourcing (ITO) has been identified as an essential determinant for ITO success. While prior studies have shed light on how to determine effective governance to inform practice, little research attention has been reversely initiated from practice when certain governance model is implemented. In this paper, I have addressed two concepts of Governance-in-Contract (GiC) and ...