Significant renewed interest in Rawls’s original position has emerged. In this article, I argue that the recent original position arguments, despite their increased sophistication regarding decision-theoretic considerations behind the veil of ignorance or attempts to bypass such considerations, still talk past each other. In an important way, the arguments have it backwards. The significance of original position arguments, especially for contemporary pluralistic societies, lies not in defending a unique moral outcome due to the application of formal methods, but rather in justifying the moral assumptions that inform the design of the original position and their best formalization.
The launch of Ligue 1+ for the 2025–2026 season marks a major paradigm shift in the industrial economics of French professional football. Faced with the absence of credible bidders during the television rights tender, the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP) opted to internalize the broadcasting function, thereby simultaneously becoming the producer and a shareholder of its own content. This strategy, unprecedented in Europe, raises fundamental questions about the sustainability of a self-broadcasting model in a market dominated by the need to balance pricing accessibility and profitability. Despite initial commercial success—surpassing one million subscribers within two months—the cost structure remains unfavorable. Due to a combination of general taxation, specific levies, distributor commissions, and the mandatory participation of the CVC Partners fund (13
The lack of literature covering the association of the interactions between manager and employee characteristics with team performance highlights a significant gap. We test the association of team performance in men’s football with player and head coach turnover, origin and age, the interactions between players and head coach for each characteristic, Transfermarkt value and roster size. Data are from the Turkish Süper Lig over 2009–2023 and found on Transfermarkt. A significant positive association is found for foreign players, the interaction between foreign players and domestic head coach, player age and Transfermarkt value. A significant negative association is found for player departures, the interaction between player departures and “old” head coach, head coach age, age difference between head coach and players, and roster size. No significant association is found for other variables. Clubs could attract foreign players but not necessarily a foreign head coach and use their economic resources to retain their players, while they could also consider age difference between head coach and players. We address a gap by covering the association between team performance and the interactions between player and head coach characteristics. The originality/value comes from the gap addressed.
This study examines how the length of post-retirement life affects individuals’ consumption-saving behavior in relation to the optimal consumption path. We conducted a laboratory experiment in which participants solved a simple life-cycle consumption–saving problem without uncertainty or volatility in interest rates, prices, or income. Lifetime was divided into working periods with constant income and retirement periods with no income. The experiment featured three treatments that varied the length and timing of retirement while holding lifetime income constant: LS (long working and short retirement) (5 retirement periods out of 25), LL (long working and long retirement) (16 out of 36), and SL (short working and long retirement) (16 out of 25). Across all the treatments, the participants’ consumption consistently deviated from the optimal consumption path in both the working and retirement periods. Although these deviations decreased after retirement, they persisted. Participants in LL and SL made larger absolute errors than those in LS during both periods, and their tendency to over-save after retirement was significantly greater relative to LS. These results suggest that extending the length of post-retirement life can result in systematic bias toward over-saving behavior, even in the absence of uncertainty.
The paradox of voting and strategic voting can be explained by the concept of ’casual responsibility’ in voting, as proposed by Goldman (Soc Philos Policy 16(2):201–217, 1999) This concept suggests that a voter feels ‘responsible’ for the candidate she votes for, even if her vote is not decisive. I present a formal model that is inspired by this theory. The model assumes that a voter’s utility from a winning candidate is higher if she votes for him, and lower if she votes for a candidate she dislikes. This model effectively explains the paradox of voting and the occurrence of strategic voting, even when the additional utility of ’being on the side of the winner’ is negligible.
Research on nudges relies on several competing frameworks, making it difficult to compare interventions or identify the mechanisms that drive their effectiveness. This paper introduces BOTTOM (Brain, Orientation, Transparency, Triggers, Objective, Mind), a holistic framework that integrates six validated taxonomies and extends the widely used MINDSPACE framework. Rather than replacing MINDSPACE, BOTTOM decomposes each of its nine nudge categories into six analytical dimensions, shifting attention from fixed typologies to the underlying mechanisms through which nudges operate. This approach reduces inconsistencies arising from the arbitrary use of a single classification system. We illustrate the value of BOTTOM through applications such as nudges to increase vegetable consumption, improve vaccine adherence, and analyze dark nudges in financial decision-making. By providing a unified and multidimensional structure, BOTTOM enhances the design, comparison, and evaluation of behavioral interventions in both experimental and meta-analytical research.
This paper proposes a protocol to investigate preferences for unconditional basic income (UBI) through the lens of social preferences. Bridging economic philosophy and experimental economics, the design builds on the conceptual link between Van Parijs’s theory of justice, rooted in Rawlsian maximin reasoning, and social preference types such as maximin, efficiency, and inequality aversion. While a few previous studies have applied Rawlsian or Van Parijsian reasoning in laboratory settings to elucidate preferences for UBI, they often suffer from limited sample sizes, lack of monetary incentives, or incomplete theoretical frameworks. Broader empirical approaches, such as cross-sectional surveys, field experiments and referenda, offer insights into political feasibility but struggle to capture individuals’ underlying normative reasoning and are highly sensitive to context and framing. Responding to these limits, the protocol adopted here is modular and adaptable, allowing researchers to test various redistributive schemes, framings, or funding mechanisms. Beyond the UBI case, this framework contributes to a broader reflection on the understanding of fairness in distributive choices.
This paper does not add a novel solution or a novel justification for an existing solution of the puzzle of the absent-minded driver. Rather it wants to set existing solutions into the right perspective. It argues that the puzzle is not about absent-mindedness at all, but about indexically presented indistinguishable alternatives. It identifies a common assumption as one about the relation between beliefs about indexical and non-indexical propositions. So, this is what is involved in the puzzle. This assumption entails the favorite solution of the puzzle and is stated as a general a priori symmetry principle for indexical propositions.
This paper examines the connections between Isaac Newton, Robert Simson, and Adam Smith, highlighting the influence of the Newtonian scientific method. Smith, influenced by Simson’s teachings, regarded Simson as a leading mathematician of their time. Simson’s innovative application of ancient porisms to explain Newtonian fluxions challenged existing perspectives and had a profound impact on the Scottish Enlightenment, which in turn shaped Smith’s seminal work, The Wealth of Nations. This paper clarifies how Smith integrated the Newtonian method into his philosophical and economic theories, emphasizing the interconnections among these influential figures and their lasting contributions.
This paper discusses the relationship of the two models of man presented by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations—and the working of the invisible hand. There appears to be an inherent conflict of the market solution and the working of the price mechanism with “sympathy,” the key concept proposed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the source of social evaluation, self-evaluation and individual action—and the impartial spectator controlling individual action. We will give an extended explanation for this incongruence and, given this background, elaborate on Smith’s social program of educating the common people. References to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, Ken Binmore’s evolutionary theory of fairness, and Karl Polanyi’s critical comments in The Great Transformation on the emergence of the market society demonstrate that Smith does not give us a moral theory but a tool kit for moral behavior, on the one hand, and conditions and implications of a market economy, on the other—exemplified by the two models of man which he applies.
This paper discusses the use Adam Smith made in the Wealth of Nations (WN) of physiocratic concepts and ideas. Notwithstanding his critique of the ‘Agricultural system’, Smith endorsed many distinctively physiocratic ideas and in his analyses of value and distribution, of the reproduction and accumulation of capital, and of development and growth adopted (and adapted) several physiocratic concepts. In particular, the paper argues that Smith adopted the ‘material expenses’ approach of the Physiocrats and sought to use it side by side with his tentative proposal of a labour-based approach to the theory of value, and draws attention to inconsistencies and tensions which arise from the simultaneous presence of the two different approaches to the theory of value in the WN. By adopting physiocratic ideas on the relationship between corn prices and money wages, Smith is also seen to have provided the key elements for David Ricardo’s ‘corn ratio reasoning’ in his early theory of profits.
In recent decades, scholarly work on Adam Smith clarified important aspects of his multi-faceted account of human agency. However, the relevance of his view of knowledge and agency for political economy as science of the legislator has not been clarified sufficiently. It is contended here that Smith’s view of human agency in socio-economic contexts is linked to a kind of pragmatic pluralism, emphasizing the role of the knowledge made available by scientific “systems”, but also their limitations and incompleteness. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, his discussions of the mercantile system and honesty in commerce are considered as examples of pragmatic pluralism reflecting such limitations, while opening up horizons of reasonable disagreement and problem-responsive reform avoiding technocratic fallacies and reckless experimentation.
The paper examines evolutionary elements in Adam Smith’s social theory, connecting them to an earlier contribution to natural history by George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. It then compares Smith’s analysis with those of Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter, who were fascinated by Darwinian evolutionary biology. This comparison demonstrates that while developing evolutionary approaches to the social sciences suitable for their respective subject matter, Marx and Schumpeter drew heavily on Smith’s insights. All three authors aimed to unveil the forces shaping the “process of civilization”, or society’s “law of motion,” along with its associated hazards. They pondered whether this process inherently led to rising living standards, along with “equality, liberty, and justice”, and whether it could derail, ending in a tailspin.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx are commonly viewed as opposites, both in terms of their approaches to political economy and their ideological outlooks: Smith as a champion of individual self-interest and unfettered capitalist development; Marx as the harsh critic of the injustice and irrationality of capitalist commodity production. Marx was, however, in many important methodological and theoretical dimensions, in fact, a “Smithian”. In this paper we explore Smith’s influence on Marx in several dimensions. The most important in our view is Marx’s adoption of Smith’s “long-period reasoning” as the framework for his theories of value, surplus value, allocation of labor and exploitation. Marx instinctively shared many other Smithian views, including Smith’s rejection of diminishing returns to specialization as a limiting factor in capital accumulation, the factors underlying demographics, the role and potential of technical change, and the theory of money. Marx’s “vision” diverged sharply from Smith on the question of the universality of capitalist social relations of commodity production, and the possibility of socialist alternatives to capitalist commodity production as a framework for organizing the division of labor. This paper surveys the areas where Marx found substantial common ground with Smith, as well as the questions on which Marx parted company with Smith through a careful exegesis of Marx’s own discussion and evaluation of Smith’s ideas. This clarifies the ways in which Marx worked from his understanding of Smith as a base to develop his critique of political economy.
Many coalitional values have been introduced in the literature on cooperative games over the last decades, and especially since 2000. The multiplicity of options suggests the convenience of testing the existence of stable coalition structures, in the sense of Hart and Kurz (1983, Econometrica), when payments are made using some of these values. We recall their concept of γ –stability and give results for the proportional partitional Shapley value, introduced by Alonso–Meijide et al (2015, Discrete Appl. Math.), which shares the utility of any coalition proportionally to the Shapley value of the involved players in the original game.
In Italy cultural policies are often set at national level without taking into account the dualism between the Northern and the Southern regions that exists in different social and economic sectors. Our aim is to fill this lacuna and to examine the Italian theatre market from both the demand and supply side considering the four Italian macro-areas. To this end, we apply both the seemingly unrelated regression and the three stage least square estimation techniques, to identify the factors influencing theatre demand and supply. The empirical analysis is conducted using a 35-year panel data (1980–2014) at country level (20 Italian regions) and separately for the four main areas (each of them including the related regions): North West, North East, Centre, and South and Islands. At the country level, the estimated results confirm as determinants of theatre demand, price and consumer income as well as complementary good (cinema), urban agglomeration and tourism flows. Theatre supply is influenced by past ticket price, income, past attendance, urban agglomeration and public subsidies. At regional level the results provide empirical support for the existence of a strong heterogeneity from both the demand and supply sides. We find that some of the variables that influence attendance and performances at national level play a different role at the local level hence cultural policies should take into account this heterogeneity.
