We consider Effort Games, a game-theoretic model of cooperation in open environments, which is a variant of the principal-agent problem from economic theory. In our multiagent domain, a common project depends on various tasks; carrying out certain subsets of the tasks completes the project successfully, while carrying out other subsets does not. The probability of carrying out a task is higher when the agent in charge of it exerts effort, at a certain cost for that agent. A central authority, called (...) the principal, attempts to incentivize agents to exert effort, but can only reward agents based on the success of the entire project.We model this domain as a normal form game, where the payoffs for each strategy profile are defined based on the different probabilities of carrying out each task and on the boolean function that defines which task subsets complete the project, and which do not. We view this boolean function as a simple coalitional game, and call this game the underlying coalitional game. We suggest the Price of Myopia as a measure of the influence the model of rationality has on the minimal payments the principal has to make in order to motivate the agents in such a domain to exert effort.We consider the computational complexity of testing whether exerting effort is a dominant strategy for an agent, and of finding a reward strategy for this domain, using either a dominant strategy equilibrium or using iterated elimination of dominated strategies. We show these problems are generally #P-hard, and that they are at least as computationally hard as calculating the Banzhaf power index in the underlying coalitional game. We also show that in a certain restricted domain, where the underlying coalitional game is a weighted voting game with certain properties, it is possible to solve all of the above problems in polynomial time. We give bounds on PoM in weighted voting effort games, and provide simulation results regarding PoM in another restricted class of effort games, namely effort games played over Series-Parallel Graphs. (shrink)

What is inequality? In the late 1990s there was an explosion of interest in the subject that yielded a substantial body of formal tools and results for income-distribution analysis. Nearly all of this is founded on a small set of core assumptions - such as the Principle of Transfers, scale independence, the population principle∑ - that are used to give meaning to specific concepts of inequality measurement, inequality ranking and, indeed, to inequality itself. But does the standard axiomatic structure coincide (...) with public perceptions of inequality? Or is the economist's concept of inequality a thing apart, perpetuated through serial brainwashing in the way the subject is studied and taught? In this 1999 book, Amiel and Cowell examine the evidence from a large international questionnaire experiment using student respondents. Along with basic 'cake-sharing' issues, related questions involving social-welfare rankings, the relationship between inequality and overall income growth and the meaning of poverty comparisons are considered. (shrink)

Central aspects of Hume’s proposed “system of the sciences” as described in the Treatise are modeled on Newton’s Principia. But, as recent scholarship has suggested, Hume’s Treatise also bears a deeply subversive message with respect to Newtonian science. This chapter offers a revised overview of what Hume takes from Newton and what he rejects: The first part of the chapter argues that in the Treatise Hume adopts a version of Newton’s “analytic and synthetic method” for philosophy, thereby placing a distinctively (...) Newtonian form of explanatory reduction at the center of his own philosophical method. The second part of the chapter, on the other hand, shows that many of the most important aspects of Hume’s argument in Book 1 of the Treatise can be understood as critical of core conceptual and ontological commitments of Newton’s mechanics as developed in the Principia. (shrink)

Introduction: beyond reason and revelation -- Pt. I. Reading Hebrew scripture -- Ch. 1. The structure of the Hebrew Bible -- Ch. 2. What is the purpose of the Hebrew Bible? -- Ch. 3. How does the Bible make arguments of a general nature? -- The philosophy of Hebrew scripture: five studies -- Ch. 4. The ethics of a shepherd -- Ch. 5. The history of Israel, Genesis-kings: a political philosophy -- Ch. 6. Jeremiah and the problem of knowing -- (...) Ch. 7. Truth and being in Hebrew scripture -- Ch. 8. Jerusalem and carthage -- Pt. III. Conclusion -- Ch. 9. God's speech after reason and revelation -- Appendix: what is "reason"? some preliminary remarks. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 104-105.

This paper studies the role that known bounds on message transmission times in a computer network play on the evolution of the epistemic state over time. A connection to cones of causal influence analogous to, and more general than, light cones is presented. Focusing on lower bounds on message transmission times, an analysis is presented of how knowledge about when others are guaranteed to be ignorant about an event of interest can arise. This has implications in competitive settings, in which (...) knowing about another’s ignorance can provide an advantage. (shrink)

The American Declaration of Independence served as a starting point for the drafting of the Israeli Declaration of Independence of 1948. Most of the original content was lost in the long process of translation and adaptation, but, using David Armitage’s recent terminology, the Israeli text remained as "generically promiscuous" as its predecessor, combining a "manifesto" of justifications for the assumption of sovereignty, a formal proclamation and a proto-Bill of Rights. This Article depicts the work of Mordechai Beham, the Israeli Declaration’s (...) first draftsman, as a remarkable exercise in choosing contemporary, locally-valid "answers" to the fundamental "questions" posed by Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries in 18th century America on human values, national identity, statehood, and God. The analysis is partially based in the current debate on "legal transplantation," arguing that the outstanding success of the Israeli Declaration stems from both the quality of the American original and the massive work of adaptation to Israeli soil. (shrink)

The effort to rid criminal responsibility of factors beyond the agent’s control created an opportunity for a new balance in the law of attempt between aggravated penalties and full exoneration for voluntary renunciation. The present analysis claims that the opportunity has been missed both in Israel and in the United States because of an unwarranted concern for the moral tenor of renunciation. Analysis of the difference between successes and failures in renunciation cases is offered in support of the proposition that (...) the proper balance between ex post and ex ante considerations is only applied where courts empathize with the victims of specific crimes. In other cases, immediate victims are readily used as means to prevent uncertain future crime. The claim is also made that concern with the moral tenor of renunciation creates an anomaly in modern criminal law. While the decision to initiate a crime act is judged on ever narrower pictures of character and motive, the decision to abandon it before actual harm is inflicted increasingly attracts interest in the inner processes behind it. I claim that the anomaly manifests the danger of blurring the line between reality and fantasy when the struggle against luck is not properly checked. (shrink)

Shared decision-making between patients and physicians strives to balance decisional responsibility for clinical decisions. Directed by patients, SDM incorporates patients’ values and prefere...

Over the past decade, US patients and clinicians have endured medication shortages of nearly every class, including many lifesaving medications. These shortages have persisted despite determined efforts by federal, academic, and professional organizations. Medication shortages have resulted in lost lives, medication errors, and substantial financial cost. Economic drivers are the primary cause for drug shortages, exacerbated by manufacturing and quality problems, and unreliable and uncertain sources for many raw materials required to synthesize these drugs. Drug shortages force clinicians to make (...) untenable choices and decide which of their patients should receive a lifesaving scarce medication. The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed many hospitals’ ability to provide basic care and aggravated existing drug shortages. The influx of patients suffering from COVID-19 has exposed flaws in the fractured manner in which essential medications reach patients. The unique nature of COVID-19, often requiring prompt and decisive clinical decision-making, challenges the accepted approach for ethical analysis adopted by clinical ethicists. The author, a clinician and bioethicist, notes the ethical challenges he and other frontline providers have faced in deciding which patients are “more deserving” of a scarce medication. (shrink)

The ArgumentOne disconcerting aspect of the role of culture in shaping human suffering is the gap between the explanatory models of therapists and patients in multicultural settings. This gap is particularly noted in working with Jewish ultra–Orthodox psychiatric patients whose idioms of distress are often derived from a sacred reality not easily reconcilable with psychomedical reality. To meet the challenge to therapeutic efficacy that this incompatibility may pose, we propose a culturally sensitive therapy based on strategic principles that focus on (...) the patient's mythic world and religious idioms of distress as the kernel of therapeutic interventions. Using one case of post–traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as illustration, we seek to show how the religious symbols through which the patient's distress was articulated may be manipulated to effect cure. The case highlights the narrative quality of both illness construction and self–reconstruction. (shrink)

Section 170 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code is known as the “charitable contribution deduction.” This Article explores the section’s rationale as well as its effect on income/wealth distribution. It reaches the conclusion that the deduction can be justified on efficiency and democracy grounds, but is not “charitable,” as its distributive effects are neutral or even regressive.

In a previous article I argued that tipping facilitates tax evasion, hurts employees’ financial security in the long run, and is a form of negative externality imposed by wealthy people on the rest of society. In this Article I try to understand the reasons for the greater popularity of the norm in the U.S. compared to other countries, suggesting it may be related to the U.S. cultural preference for linking redistribution with work requirements, relatively high income inequality and consumerism. To (...) that end, I further develop the negative externality argument suggested in the previous article by looking at trends in income inequality in the U.S. and by interpreting the global distribution of the norm through the prism of my inequality/negative externality argument. I then look at the tax treatment of tips in various countries in search of a pattern that supports the differences in social norms. (shrink)

I address three key questions in Jewish theology that have come up in readers’ criticism of my book The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture: How should we think about God’s revelation to man if, as I have proposed, the sharp distinction between divine revelation and human reason is alien to the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic sources? Is the biblical Law of Moses intended to be a description of natural law, suggesting the path to life and the good for all nations? (...) And what should be the role of the Jewish theologian, given the overwhelming prevalence of Christian conceptions of God and Scripture in contemporary theological discourse. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, microenterprise development programs have proliferated in the United States, where they are widely praised as strategies for economic development and poverty alleviation, especially for low-income women and welfare mothers. Based on research in a highly respected urban center for women, this article argues that microenterprise development is more detrimental and problematic than it is purported to be. Two reasons are isolated. First, gender constraints mean women tend to choose small-scale, undercapitalized, and barely profitable “pink-collar” businesses, largely home-based (...) operations based on work women are already doing as part of their gender-specific role. Second, microenterprise training programs reinforce this business segregation by discounting the sociocultural conditions women bring with them to business and instead emphasizing the personal growth of individuals. The result is that women are encouraged to maintain their economic vulnerability and social peripheralization rather than become part of the mainstream business world. (shrink)

In this book Yoram Lubling and Eric Evans offer a Deweyan reconstruction of our philosophical understanding of well-being. They begin with Dewey's critique of the philosophical fallacy to examine the legitimacy and value of theories of well-being offered by traditional philosophy. However, such theories fail to provide an authentic account of well-being due to a false understanding of "experience" as either epistemic or cognitive. Next, using Dewey's theory of experience, they reconstruct happiness as the target for evaluation of well-being. (...) This leads them to reject the traditional view of a private encapsulated self, and to offer in its place a "transactionally situated self" which is an embodied, enculturated agent. Through their emphasis on the importance of the qualitative aspects of Dewey's understanding of a situation, the "pervasive quality of the situation" emerges as the most plausible criterion for the evaluation of well-being. The authors use Dewey's theories of inquiry, ethics, value and art to establish the naturalistic conditions under which such "pervasive quality" enters into a situation as either settled or unsettled, in other words, as peace in motion. Consequently, a "problematic situation" becomes the primary condition under which all inquiry initiates whether it is in the context of science, ethics, values, art or ordinary living. Lubling and Evans conclude that a Deweyan account of well-being involves "embodied knowing" instead of the traditional view of cognitive knowledge. By using such an account, it is possible to explain the conditions and mechanisms under which well-being contributes to the enlargement and enrichment of individual and collective human experience. (shrink)

The article follows the conceptual path made by the teaching thinking movement. It emerged as a reaction to the explosion, obsolescence, availability, and relativity of knowledge, as a call to teach thinking instead of knowledge, and returned to knowledge in the form of the third approach to teaching thinking — teaching for understanding. Understanding knowledge is the essential, perhaps even sufficient, condition for good — effective, critical and creative — thinking.

The article follows the conceptual path made by the teaching thinking movement. It emerged as a reaction to the explosion, obsolescence, availability, and relativity of knowledge, as a call to teach thinking instead of knowledge, and returned to knowledge in the form of the third approach to teaching thinking — teaching for understanding. Understanding knowledge is the essential, perhaps even sufficient, condition for good — effective, critical and creative — thinking.

The article aims at (1) organizing the theoretical ideas of critical thinking on the basis of an overall and systematic conception of education, (2) exposing tensions and contradictions in the various conceptions of critical thinking and (3) suggesting a directing principle for the teaching of critical thinking. In order to achieve these far-reaching aims, the author projects “The Cognitive Map of Instruction” developed by Zvi Lamm on the discourse of critical thinking. Through this “map” it seems that all sub-trends of (...) teaching critical thinking may be divided into three defined “logics,” and that these sub-trends harbor two kinds of internal contradictions: between the different “logics” of teaching, and between their pattern of teaching and the idea of critical thinking. Since none of the three “logics” suggested by Lamm (1976) in “The Cognitive Map of Instruction” suits the purpose of teaching critical thinking, the article turns away from this “map,” that served it so well to locate and expose the various trends of critical thinking. This turn is made on behalf of another idea of Lamm—that of undermining pedagogy. This well-rooted idea may direct the pedagogy of critical thinking toward a coherent and effective instruction. (shrink)