Rae and Lonborg’s (2015) findings are intriguing. They show greater Facebook (FB) use intensity can have beneficial or adverse effects on psychological well-being (PWB) depending on the user’s motives. This underlines that not all motives are equal: some motives are harmful and others helpful when it comes to PWB and psychopathology outcomes. Four central issues were raised: (1) exclusive focus...

We analyze a model of monopolistic price discrimination where only some consumers are originally sufficiently informed about their preferences, e.g., about their future demand for a utility such as electricity or telecommunication. When more consumers become informed, we show that this benefits also those consumers who remain uninformed, as it reduces the firm’s incentives to extract informatio...

This paper analyses the impact of public policies supporting open source software (OSS). Users can be divided between those who know about the existence of OSS, the ”informed” adopters, and the ”uninformed” ones; the presence of uniformed users yields to market failures that justify government intervention. We study three policies: i) mandatory adoption, when government forces public agencies, ...

In my first lecture I listed seven questions about reasons that seemed to require answers. These were: Relational Character: Reasons are reasons for an agent. How is this relational character to be understood? Ground of Truth: In virtue of what are claims about reasons true, when they are true? Does the idea that claims about reasons are true or false, independent of our opinions about them, an...

H ow has language developed in humans and what genetic changes underlie our unique cognitive abilities? Accounts of positive selection that lead to such abilities in humans fascinate us because of the insight they provide into our own evolution, and into the many genetic differences that distinguish us from other apes. The genes that became fi xed in our lineage as a result of positive selectio...