Homo Oeconomicus versus Homo Reciprocans: Ansätze für ein neues Wirtschaftspolitisches Leitbild?

Public opinion and politics are strongly influenced by economic theory and economic policy advice. Most of the underlying economic reasoning is based on the assumptions of a universal homo oeconomicus. Whether people act according to these assumptions is an empirical question, however. In this paper we report evidence of controlled laboratory experiments, which clearly indicates that contrary to the standard assumptions, reciprocity and fairness are central motives of human behavior. This has important implications for policy advice. We discuss several examples, e.g., tax moral, the design of the welfare state, hidden costs of incentives, wage rigidities and the economics of crim

Philosophical Objection to the Optimal Tax Model, A

This article questions the normative power of the optimal tax model by examining assumptions made by the developer of that model, James Mirrlees\u27 . It makes a case for moving beyond utilitarian conceptions of social welfare that are at the foundation of the optimal tax model, and that have become the dominant construct in tax policy analysis. In explaining why the Mirrlees assumptions are problematic, the Article argues for a nuanced, philosophical understanding of fairness that incorporates the role of taxation into a broader conception of a just society. A fair tax must satisfy the full range of demands that a just society places on government exercising its coercive power over individuals. Applying that philosophical approach to tax fairness reveals significant deficiencies in the assumption that a tax on ability to earn is truly optimal as a matter of justice. The Article proceeds as follows. The next Part explores why the Mirrlees ideal is attractive to economists, and expresses skepticism about the economic analysis on its own terms. Part III introduces the legal literature and describes why ability taxation has been attractive to those who care about fairness in taxation. It shifts the focus to fairness in political theory, contending that fairness in taxation must be understood as a conception of equality. It critiques endowment taxation as an ideal on those terms, arguing that endowment tells us much less about inequality among individuals than we might hope; the proponents of ability taxation have misunderstood the nature of liberty and equality essential to liberal egalitarian political theory. The Article concludes by considering why the discussion about inequality in taxation has focused on human endowment rather than financial endowment, and suggests a way forward for breaking out of the utilitarian mold and using a philosophical conception of fairness more broadly in thinking about justice in taxation

Quantitative multi-objective verification for probabilistic systems

We present a verification framework for analysing multiple quantitative objectives of systems that exhibit both nondeterministic and stochastic behaviour. These systems are modelled as probabilistic automata, enriched with cost or reward structures that capture, for example, energy usage or performance metrics. Quantitative properties of these models are expressed in a specification language that incorporates probabilistic safety and liveness properties, expected total cost or reward, and supports multiple objectives of these types. We propose and implement an efficient verification framework for such properties and then present two distinct applications of it: firstly, controller synthesis subject to multiple quantitative objectives; and, secondly, quantitative compositional verification. The practical applicability of both approaches is illustrated with experimental results from several large case studies

Proof rules and transformations dealing with fairness

AbstractWe provide proof rules enabling the treatment of two fairness assumptions in the context of Dijkstra's do-od-programs. These proof rules are derived by considering a transformed version of the original program which uses random assignments z≔? and admits only fair computations. Various, increasingly complicated, examples are discussed. In all cases reasonably simple proofs can be given. The proof rules use well-founded structures corresponding to infinite ordinals and deal with the original programs and not their translated versions

Public Legal Reason

This essay develops an ideal of public legal reason--a normative theory of legal reasons that is appropriate for a society characterized by religious and moral pluralism. One of the implications of this theory is that normative theorizing about public and private law should eschew reliance on the deep premises of deontology or consequentialism and should instead rely on what the author calls public values--values that can be affirmed without relying on the deep and controversial premises of particular comprehensive moral doctrines. The ideal of public legal reason is then applied to a particular question--whether welfarism (a particular form of normative law and economics) provides the sort of reasons that appropriate for legal practice. The answer to that question is no--to the extent that welfarism contends that the normative assessment of legal policies should rely exclusively on information about individual preferences, welfarism relies on deep and controversial premises of consequentialist moral theory that fail the test of public reason. The essay also investigates the thesis--advanced by Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell--that any fairness principle (a nonwelfarist method of policy assessment) can violate weak Pareto (making everyone worse off). Whatever the implications of Kaplow and Shavell\u27s argument, it does not show that welfarism can provide public legal reasons. The essay concludes that law\u27s justifications should rely on normative principles that are accessible to reasonable citizens, whether they are theists or atheists, deontologists or consequentialists, moral philosophers or economists. Law\u27s deliberations should be shallow and not deep. Law\u27s reason should be public

Event Systems and Access Control

We consider the interpretations of notions of access control (permissions, interdictions, obligations, and user rights) as run-time properties of information systems specified as event systems with fairness. We give proof rules for verifying that an access control policy is enforced in a system, and consider preservation of access control by refinement of event systems. In particular, refinement of user rights is non-trivial; we propose to combine low-level user rights and system obligations to implement high-level user rights