Choice Group

Abstract: The aim of this presentation is to provide psychological insights into the relationship between rewards and effort. The association between the two may seem trivially simple, that is, we put more in to get more back. In addition to this, other simple assumptions that are held in psychological and behavioural economic literature (i.e. effort is aversive, effort aversion is…

Abstract: A notorious problem with Savage's decision theory and much of the literature on decisions under uncertainty is the reliance on ready-made and fixed concepts of outcomes and states. Real decision makers first of all need to form such concepts before even beginning to engage into expected-utility reasoning. Worse, a real agent’s concepts of outcomes and states – that is,…

Abstract: Proponents of an accuracy-centered epistemology have argued that proper scoring rules can be used to assess the accuracy of degrees of belief (or “credences”), and have suggested that certain core epistemic norms for credecnces can be understood and justified with the help of such rules. Many who go this route are attracted to the idea that revising credences in light…

Abstract: Egalitarians usually task themselves with answering the "equality of what?" question, having assumed that we already enjoy a status as "abstract" equals. But what is it about us which is such that we are owed an equal amount of something-or-other? This is what Jeremy Waldron calls "basic equality". Human beings come in all shapes and sizes, and exhibit striking…

Abstract: A war of national defense (WND) is a war waged by a victim state (V) to defend itself against an attack whose aim is not to kill any of the members of V, but rather to acquire control over certain “political goods.” These political goods include: i) the control of V’s political institutions; ii) the imposition of certain political and…

Abstract: TBA   #LSEChoiceGroup

Abstract: Background for this study on how to share a burden is the most recent economic situation in several countries in Southern Europe and in Ireland. These countries were forced to introduce severe budget cuts after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 which had unleashed a financial crisis in many industrialised countries of the Western world. We do not ask…

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Goreti Faria: "A Preference for Late Resolution of Uncertainty" Kreps and Porteus (1978) (KP) offer an axiomatic approach to dynamic decision problems that allows us to explicitly model preferences regarding how a decision is made. In particular, their model makes it possible to explicitly model preferences for the timing of the resolution of uncertainty. In the orthodox framework (vNM) uncertainties resolving…

Juries, committees and expert panels appraise all manner of things. Often they do so by awarding grades: ordered evaluative predicates such as Excellent, Average and Poor, or the qualitative probability expressions Likely, Tossup and Unlikely … #LSEChoiceGroup

A webmaster’s decision to link to a webpage can be interpreted as a “vote” for that webpage. But how far does the parallel between linking and voting extend? … #LSEChoiceGroup

The problem to be discussed in this talk concerns interaction between value incommensurability and risk, More specifically, it focuses on value comparisons between risky actions whose outcomes are guaranteed to be mutually incommensurable in value: they will be incommensurable whatever state the world is in. It might seem that the actions compared should themselves in all such cases be incommensurable. But this intuition, as we shall see, might well be challenged; indeed, it should be challenged… #LSEChoiceGroup

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If you ask someone to divide a pie between two imaginary recipients, they are likely to recommend a 50/50 split. Philosophers like Brian Skyrms and Jason Alexander have employed evolutionary game theory to explain why such "fair" divisions are almost universally observed in experimental work, and to explain the ubiquity of stated norms of fairness in human societies. When one moves away from an idealized lab setting, however, resource division is rarely governed by these stated norms. In this talk, Cailin O’Connor will use evolutionary game theory to show why unequal patterns of division often emerge between social groups.

Roberto Veneziani and Marco Mariotti analyse the liberal ethics of noninterference in social choice. A liberal principle, capturing noninterfering views of society and inspired by John Stuart Mill's conception of liberty, is examined. The principle expresses the idea that society should not penalise individuals after changes in their situation that do not affect others. An impossibility for liberal approaches is highlighted: every social decision rule that satisfies unanimity and a general principle of noninterference must be dictatorial. This raises some important issues for liberal approaches in social choice and political philosophy.

Lara Buchak defends a decision theory designed to allow for rational risk avoidance, and shows that it entails that rational agents can be instrumentally required to avoid evidence. We argue that, if Buchak's theory is correct, then rational agents can also be epistemically required to avoid evidence. We also argue that both of these consequences rely only on very weak assumptions about how rational agents respond to evidence.

Definitions of death are said to be important because they tell us at what point someone dies, which ethicists need to know in order to work out when someone loses the intrinsic moral status of the living. This paper argues we need not know what death is or when it occurs in order to answer these ethical questions. Questions about the significance of death are really questions about the significance of the various specific losses that figure in definitions of death. Which of those losses amounts to death makes no difference.