LEES Winter School
International PhD program LEES
International and public Law, Ethics & Economics for Sustainability
Day 5
Friday 2 December
Behavioral Economics and Game Theory
Shaun Hargreaves-Heap (ALL WEEK)
Professor of Political Economy
King’s College, London
Lecture 1: Why ‘rights’ matter: Walter Lippmann and the Marxist-Liberal tradition
Walter Lippmann’s 1937 book The Good Society combines Marx’s materialism with a Liberal commitment to liberty. He wrote it to help explain why liberalism had foundered in the 1920s and 30s and to explain why the revival of liberalism would depend on re-imaging what liberty entails. In this lecture, I argue that his analysis of the crisis of liberalism in the 30s is readily extendable to the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy and so are his policy conclusions. In particular, I argue that policy should focus on the character of the rules in a society (and their associated disposition of ‘rights’) and not on outcomes. Much welfare economics and even the behaviourally informed agenda of ’nudging’, therefore, misses the point.
Lecture 2: Which democratic rights matter? Experiments on the influence of voting and voice
Does being in an ‘inclusive’ organisation affect people’s effort? Are democracies really less likely to go to war than dictatorships? If the answer is yes, what aspects of ‘inclusivity’ or democracy explain this difference? For example, is it the right to vote on collective actions and/or the right to express an opinion on what should be done? To help answer thrse questions, I report in this lecture on two experiments that examine whether the existence of democratic rights of voting and voice affect behaviour in public goods games and in contest games. Both experiments suggest that it is the right to express an opinion that matters.
Theories of Justice and Behavioral Ethics
Pedro Francés-Gómez (FROM WEDNESDAY TO FRIDAY)
Professor of Moral Philosophy
Universidad de Granada
Social Contract Theories And Legitimacy
This lecture explores Rousseau’s assertion at the very beginning of Book I of his On The Social Contract (1762): “MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.” That is, the philosophical idea of a social contract serves the purpose of answering the question about the legitimacy of social bonds. The enlightened idea is that we are all born free, and subjection may be justified only if it is voluntary. This scheme of justification may be applied to any institution and social norm. The lecture will clarify this way of justification, the difference between the sociological and philosophical concepts of legitimacy, and the application of this method to economic and corporate norms in general. Students will be invited to think what advantages and disadvantages derive from using this way of justification vs. other justification arguments, such as utilitarian ethics, communitarian ethics, non-contractarian deontological ethics, etc.
A Liberal-Egalitarian Legitimacy Principle For The Firm
This lecture will be based on my “A Liberal-Egalitarian Legitimacy Principle for the Firm”. In: Langergaard L.L. (ed.) New Economies for Sustainability. I will reflect on the prospects of a Rawlsian principle of legitimacy for corporations as a way to impose a strict morality check on corporations as (social and economic) institutions with a key role in the transition to a sustainable economy. The Rawlsian principle will be contrasted with a contractarian principle of legitimacy inspired by Binmore’s approach to justice. The lecture will also present the practical implications of these speculative ideas. It will be stressed that a fully legitimate economic system in times of transition will require social norm changes that are, according to the research led by C. Bicchieri, extremely difficult. In this context the need for joint action is the more pressing; this opens the way for future research on incentive mechanisms to help the evolution from current equilibrium to sustainable equilibria.