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...

Although mutualisms are common in all ecological communities and have played key roles in the diversification of life, our current understanding of the evolution of cooperation applies mostly to social behavior within a species. A central question is whether mutualisms persist because hosts have evolved costly punishment of cheaters. Here, we use the economic theory of employment contracts to f...

1.1. Problem formulation. To understand the flavor of questions in contract theory, we start with an one-period model in this section. Consider an agent whose utility is modelled by an exponential utility with the risk aversion γA, i.e., UA(c) = − 1 γA e −γAc. If hired at time 0, this agent manages a project, which produces an output at time 1. The output is random, and it is modelled by a norm...

This book provides a rigorous mathematical treatment of the principal-agent problem in its three main forms: • Risk sharing under full information. In this case, the principal and the agent share the same information. This case is also known as the individual rationality constraint . • Contracting under hidden action. In this case, the principal has less information than the agent. This case is...

This article shows how the principles of modern bargaining theory can help develop a better understanding of contractual terms such as royalties between copyright holders and users such as between an artist and a recording company (or between an author and a publisher). We develop the main principles in a non-technical and illustrative manner.

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...