Forgiveness is no simple matter either to execute or to understand. Charles Griswold explores forgiveness both in its guise as a virtue⎯I’ll call it “forgivingness”⎯and as something that’s more difficult to categorize, something like an act or process. Griswold’s Forgiveness provides a classical philosophical analysis of the act or process, “a theory of paradigmatic forgiveness⎯of what forgi...

The view that abortion is, with rare exceptions, seriously immoral has received little support in the recent philosophical literature. No doubt most philosophers affiliated with secular institutions of higher education believe that the anti-abortion position is either a symptom of irrational religious dogma or a conclusion generated by seriously confused philosophical argument. The purpose of t...

4 In this paper, we extend the framework of Dubey and Geanakoplos (2002) to the case 5 of moral hazard. Risk-averse consumers, who can influence the likelihood of states of 6 nature by undertaking a hidden action, receive insurance by voluntarily participating 7 in a pool of promises of deliveries of future uncertain endowments. In exchange, they 8 gain the right to receive a share of the total...

We explore the role played by libel laws in selecting the information delivered by mass media to voters. The focus is on whether such laws can reduce political corruption and increase voters’ welfare. By endogenizing the response of the voters to information from the media, we clarify under which circumstances regulation reduces or increases corruption. The analysis shows that libel laws can re...

Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’1 When we say that someon...

This paper studies a continuous-time principal-agent problem in which a principal hires an agent to do a multi-stage R&D project. The agent’s effort is unobservable and the transition from one stage to the next is modeled by a jump process with a constant Poisson arrival rate. We characterize the optimal dynamic contract that solves the repeated moral-hazard problem. In it, the agent’s payment ...

Moral relativism is an attractive position, but also one that it is difficult to formulate. In this paper, we propose an alternative way of formulating moral relativism that locates the relativity of morality in the property that makes moral claims true. Such an approach, we believe, has significant advantages over other possible ways of formulating moral relativism. We conclude by considering ...

This paper analyses the role of asymmetric information and moral hazard on IPO underpricing and lockups. I document that high information asymmetry is related to underpricing while the lockup length and lockup expiration return is related to moral hazard. Accordingly, lockup length and underpricing work as substitute signals. These results relate to the UK’s unique institutional settings: long ...

We provide an equilibrium asset pricing formula under moral hazard on the assumption of a power utility function and an endogenous riskless rate. Moral hazard is defined here as a firm’s change of measure that is incontractible. We show explicitly in closed form that moral hazard distorts asset prices by (1) moving the market price of diffusive risk in the opposite direction to an investor’s ma...