Kenneth Boulding’s AEA presidential address argued that economics is a moral science. His view derived from his general systems theory thinking, his three systems view of human society, and his early contributions to evolutionary economics. Boulding’s argument that economics could not be value-free should be distinguished from other well-known views of economics as a moral science, such as Gunn...

Communication increases contributions to public goods. Our experimental results indicate that communication is not always required. Silent identification suffices to raise solidarity in prisoner's dilemma and dictator games. Increases in solidarity are not only due to expectations of reciprocity. While mutual identification induces individuals to converge to the social norm, the spread of the d...

Li's Fourier factorization rule [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A13, 1870 (1996)] was recently shown to be problematic to apply to highly conducting metallic gratings. We provide further information about the applicability of different differential methods and are concerned with the relation of observed numerical artifacts, the total number of retained space harmonics, the presence of both positive and negat...

We examine the characteristics of effective leaders in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We focus on two factors: the individual’s cooperativeness and the individual’s beliefs about the cooperativeness of others. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are cooperatively inclined. Partly, this reflects a false consensus effect: cooperative leaders are more opt...

Empirical research suggests that rather than improving incentives exerting control can reduce workers’ performance by eroding motivation. The present paper shows that intention-based reciprocity can cause such motivational crowding-out if individuals differ in their propensity for reciprocity and preferences are private information. Not being controlled might then be considered to be kind, beca...

The constrained egalitarian solution of Dutta and Ray (1989) for TUgames is extended to asymmetric cases, using the notion of weight systems as in Kalai and Samet (1987,1988). This weighted constrained egalitarian solution is based on the weighted Lorenz-criterion as an inequality measure. It is shown that in general there is at most one such weighted egalitarian solution for TU-games. Existenc...

This essay reflects the thoughts and experience of two staff members. Mark Allen has been a resident representative in both Poland (1990–93) and Hungary (1996–1998), two countries that have moved well along the road of transformation. Rick Haas was the resident representative in Belarus (1996–98), a country where much remains to be done. In some respects they had similar experiences, in others ...

Some people have a concern for a fair distribution of incomes while others do not. Does such a concern matter for majority voting on redistribution? Fairness preferences are relevant for redistribution outcomes only if fair-minded voters are pivotal. Pivotality, in turn, depends on the structure of income classes. We experimentally study voting on redistribution between two income classes and s...

Most professional economists believe that economist in general are more selfish than other persons and that this greater selfishness is due to economic education. In this paper we offer empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set about giving behaviour to two social funds at the University of Zurich, it is shown that economic training does not make people act mor...

determine the erythrocyte transketolase (ETK) activity or thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) effect on admission, or thiamine excretion. Tanphaichitr et a13 state that thiamine excretion alone is not a good index of the state of thiamine nutrition in an individual subject. The absence of cardiac and central nervous system manifestations may be explained partially by the fact that the patient restrict...