Understanding Moral Judgments: The Role of the Agent’s Characteristics in Moral Evaluations

Traditional studies have shown that the moral judgments are influenced by many biasing factors, like the consequences of a behavior, certain characteristics of the agent who commits the act, or the words chosen to describe the behavior. In the present study we investigated a new factor that could bias the evaluation of morally relevant human behavior: the perceived similarity between the participants and the agent described in the moral scenario. The participants read a story about a driver who illegally overtook another car and hit a pedestrian who was crossing the street. The latter was taken to the hospital with a broken leg. The driver was described either as being similar to the participant (a student, 21 years old, the same gender as th­e participant) or dissimilar (a retired person, 69 years old, different gender as the participant). The results show that the participants from the increased similarity group expressed more lenient evaluations of the immorality of the driver’s behavior compared to the participants from the decreased similarity group. The results are discussed within a framework which puts emphasis on motivational and protective reasons

Evolutionary Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning

There are two distinct approaches to solving reinforcement learning problems, namely, searching in value function space and searching in policy space. Temporal difference methods and evolutionary algorithms are well-known examples of these approaches. Kaelbling, Littman and Moore recently provided an informative survey of temporal difference methods. This article focuses on the application of evolutionary algorithms to the reinforcement learning problem, emphasizing alternative policy representations, credit assignment methods, and problem-specific genetic operators. Strengths and weaknesses of the evolutionary approach to reinforcement learning are presented, along with a survey of representative applications

Optimal Incentive Contract with Endogenous Monitoring Technology

Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring technology that governs the above procedure is part of the designer's strategic planning. In otherwise standard principal-agent models with moral hazard, we allow the principal to partition agents' performance data into any finite categories and to pay for the amount of information the output signal carries. Through analysis of the trade-off between giving incentives to agents and saving the monitoring cost, we obtain characterizations of optimal monitoring technologies such as information aggregation, strict MLRP, likelihood ratio-convex performance classification, group evaluation in response to rising monitoring costs, and assessing multiple task performances according to agents' endogenous tendencies to shirk. We examine the implications of these results for workforce management and firms' internal organizations

The role of intercultural communicative competence in the development of World Englishes and Lingua Francas

There is a tendency to think of World Englishes in the noun form; as products rather than as processes (implying that one receives both ready-made, controlling the development of neither).Conceptualising World Englishes as processes in which one can participate as an agent raises the question of what skills are needed in their active construction. The author will argue that since culture resides partly in language, the development of intercultural communicative competence (Byram 1997) should play a pivotal role in foreign language education both to preserve cultural and linguistic diversity, facilitating and enhancing intercultural communication in the process. A range of skills considered central to intercultural communicative competence will be presented and illustrated showing how language students can learn to take control over the development not only of language, but of their own identities