Contracting for Catastrophe:Legitimizing Emergency Constitutions by Drawing on Social Contract Theory

Rousseau's "social contract": contracting ahead of its time?

Constitutions and Social Networks

The objective of the paper is to analyze the formation of social networks where individuals are allowed to engage in several groups at the same time. These group structures are interpreted here as social networks. Each group is supposed to have specific rules or constitutions governing which members may join or leave it. Given these constitutions, we consider a social network to be stable if no...

Social Contract Theory in the Global Context*

Nicole Hassoun’s Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations (2012) offers a novel argument for the existence of positive rights for the world’s poor, and explores institutional alternatives suitable for the realization of those rights. Hassoun’s argument is contractualist (in the broad sense), and makes the existence of positive rights depend upon the conditions...

Can Contract Theory Explain Social Preferences?∗

During the last several decades, a growing body of laboratory research has shown that human subjects do not always choose to maximize material payoffs. Economists following the lead of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1979) and Mathew Rabin (1993) have built on such research to suppose that individuals are concerned about the distribution of material rewards between themselves an...

Agency, Cyberspace, and Social Contract

The social contract has been about rights and responsibilities in human societies. Facebook and its role in manufacturing and sustaining a global social contract, a new “we” is clearly one of the research areas that needs more attention. A new “we” is coming of age in the new age of connectivity and communication with a new outlook toward responsibility and rights at individual and collective l...