In the absence of government commitment, the conduct of fiscal and monetary policy depends on the sign of inherited net nominal government obligations. When these obligations are negative, monetary policy is non-distortionary and fiscal policy distortions are smoothed over time, either forever or for a finite number of periods, depending on the initial state. For positive net nominal government...

Deontic logic is characterized by the distinction between the actual and the ideal. In this article we discuss the situation where the actual deviates from the ideal, where obligations are violated. Nonmonotonic logics can be very helpful for the formalization of deontic reasoning, in particular to infer moral cues. It has been argued that the problems related to violated obligations, e.g. the ...

Recent work has shown that preschool-aged children and adults understand freedom of choice regardless of culture, but that adults across cultures differ in perceiving social obligations as constraints on action. To investigate the development of these cultural differences and universalities, we interviewed school-aged children (4-11) in Nepal and the United States regarding beliefs about people...

Role based access control has been widely used in security critical systems. Conventional role based access control is a passive model, which makes authorization decisions on requests, and the authorization decisions contain only information about whether the corresponding requests are authorised or not. One of the potential improvements for role based access control is the augmentation of obli...

Laws express rules of conduct (‘obligations’) enforced by the means of penalties and rewards (‘incentives’). The role of incentives in shaping individual behaviour has been largely analysed in the traditional economic literature. On the contrary, very little is known about the specific role of obligations. In this paper we test whether or not obligations have any independent effect on cooperati...

Obligation policies are one main means of exercising control within an organisation. They specify the actions that some subject has to perform. The authority over these actions needs to be specified in authorisation policies. Current policy notations provide us with the needed structure to represent authorisations and obligations as policy objects for distributed systems management. They suppor...

Recent work on incidental findings, concentrating on the difficult problems posed by the ambiguous results often generated by high-tech medicine, has proceeded largely independently from recent work on medical researchers' ancillary-care obligations, the obligations that researchers have to deal with diseases or conditions besides the one(s) under study. This paper contends that the two topics ...

In the past decade, the perception of a bioterrorist threat has increased and created a demand on life scientists to consider the potential security implications of dual use research. This article examines a selection of proposed moral obligations for life scientists that have emerged to meet these concerns and the extent to which they can be considered reasonable. It also describes the underly...