We examine the effect of corruption control on efficiency and its implications for efficiency spillovers by a stochastic frontier model. Our dataset covers 102 countries from 1996 to 2014. We find a positive relationship between corruption control and efficiency. If neighboring countries have difficulty in handling corruption, the country would be negatively affected by its neighbors' corruption through efficiency spillovers. We then compare the efficiency differences across countries for three time periods: 1996–2002, 2002–2008, and 2008–2014. On average, technical efficiencies slightly increased in the second period compared to the first period. In the third period, the efficiencies declined, particularly in China.

Defining perception, awareness, consciousness and reflexive or self-reflexive consciousness is difficult. I will not linger on definitions of fuzzy concepts but will attempt to put forward evidence for the rationale that awareness is likely to emerge as a consequence of how the brain processes information. Efficiency in information processing has resulted in a limited number of preferential (motivational) states of the brain and, in fact, of the whole organism. In addition, animals have the ability to internally represent external conditions and, through interactions with the motivational state, generate expectations.

It is argued that optimal decision-making requires that possible sequences of behaviours each activate their associated neuronal networks representing cue- and context-related information. Prior to the initiation of an action, the consequences of each possible scenario are estimated. An efficient animal must have the ability to anticipate, weight and choose. This weighting occurs at a hierarchically higher level and results in signals which possess a coordinative function in activating the appropriate motivational state, response selection, activation of associated networks and maintenance of attention.

Higher cognitive executive centres perceive and recognize such signals and integrate ongoing behaviour with internal representations about the past and expectations within the context of the signal induced state. Humans experience these simultaneously-occurring processes as awareness. The nature of the subjective experience may vary from an emotional state to reflexive consciousness depending on the cognitive abilities of the species and the stage of development and the level of arousal in the individual.

Decades of experimental research show that some people forgo personal gains to benefit others in unilateral anonymous interactions. To explain these results, behavioral economists typically assume that people have social preferences for minimizing inequality and/or maximizing efficiency (social welfare). Here we present data that cannot be explained by these standard social preference models. We use a “Trade-Off Game” (TOG), where players unilaterally choose between an equitable option and an efficient option. We show that simply changing the labelling of the options to describe the equitable versus efficient option as morally right completely reverses the correlation between behavior in the TOG and play in a separate Dictator Game (DG) or Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD): people who take the action framed as moral in the TOG, be it equitable or efficient, are much more prosocial in the DG and PD. Rather than preferences for equity and/or efficiency per se, our results suggest that prosociality in games such as the DG and PD are driven by a generalized morality preference that motivates people to do what they think is morally right.

This review article discusses Leonard’s (2016) study of the ideas of an elite group of Progressive economists who flourished in the United States of America between 1885 and the late 1920s. Advising governments through think tanks and regulatory commissions, they advocated labour market policies that combined a racialized approach to immigration, eugenics, Taylorist labour market efficiency and a living wage. Their interest in women’s employment conditions was based on a Darwinian concern to protect mothers of the ‘white’ race. Parallels are drawn with Australia, where, from the turn of the 20th century, industrial tribunals established a male minimum wage designed to support the maternal role, based on similar racial preoccupations and a view that women’s ‘inefficiency’ as workers would protect men from low-wage competitors. United States Progressives, in rejecting laissez-faire economics, espoused instead a role for the state based on a holistic Darwinian sociology of racial contest: an economics of hate. It was not till the 1930s that Keynesianism emerged as an alternative macroeconomic project.

In response to the public's concerns about animal welfare in swine husbandry, the pig (Sus scrofa domesticus) sector introduced improved measures to focus on single rather than multiple dimensions of animal welfare concerns without accounting for their impact on public attitudes. These measures failed to improve attitudes to pig husbandry. The present study uses a more comprehensive approach by evaluating animal welfare measures in terms of their effect on animal welfare, farm income and public attitudes. Four measures were defined for each of the following societal aspects of sow husbandry: piglet mortality; tail biting and the indoor housing of gestating sows. A simulation model was developed to estimate the effects of the measures and Data Envelopment Analysis used to compare measures in terms of their effects on animal welfare, farm income and public attitudes. Only piglet mortality measures were found to have a positive effect on farm income but they showed a relatively low effect on animal welfare and public attitudes. The most efficient measure was that which included straw provision, daylight and increased group sizes for gestating sows. The level of improvement of a measure on animal welfare did not necessarily equate to the same level of improvement in public attitudes or decrease in farm income.

Generations of social scientists have explored whether males and females act differently in domains involving competition, risk taking, cooperation, altruism, honesty, as well as many others. Yet, little is known about gender differences in the trade-off between objective equality (i.e., equality of outcomes) and efficiency. It has been suggested that females are more equal than males, but the empirical evidence is relatively weak. This gap is particularly important, because people in power of redistributing resources often face a conflict between equality and efficiency. The recently introduced Trade-Off Game (TOG) – in which a decision-maker has to unilaterally choose between being equal or being efficient – offers a unique opportunity to fill this gap. To this end, I analyse gender differences on a large dataset including N=6,955 TOG decisions. The results show that females prefer objective equality over efficiency to a greater extent than males do. The effect turns out to be particularly strong when the TOG available options are “morally” framed in such a way to suggest that choosing the equal option is the right thing to do.

Svenson (2011) showed that choices of one of two alternative productivity increases to save production resources (e.g., man-months) were biased. Judgments of resource savings following a speed increase from a low production speed line were underestimated and following an increase of a high production speed line overestimated. The objective formula for computing savings includes differences between inverse speeds and this is intuitively very problematic for most people. The purpose of the present studies was to explore ways of ameliorating or eliminating the bias. Study 1 was a control study asking participants to increase the production speed of one production line to save the same amount of production resources (man-months) as was saved by a speed increase in a reference line. The increases judged to match the reference alternatives showed the same bias as in the earlier research on choices. In Study 2 the same task and problems were used as in Study 1, but the participants were asked first to judge the resource saving of the reference alternative in a pair of alternatives before they proceeded to the matching task. This weakened the average bias only slightly. In Study 3, the participants were asked to judge the resources saved from each of two successive increases of the same single production line (other than those of the matching task) before they continued to the matching problems. In this way a participant could realize that a second production speed increase from a higher speed (e.g., from 40 to 60 items /man-month) gives less resource savings than the same speed increase from a first lower speed (e.g., from 20 to 40 items/man-month. Following this, the judgments of the same problems as in the other studies improved and the bias decreased significantly but it did not disappear. To be able to make optimal decisions about productivity increases, people need information about the bias and/or reformulations of the problems.

We outline the potential for integrating economic and evolutionary approaches to marriage and the family. Our broad argument is that the approaches share a concern for competition. Evolutionary scholars are concerned with the fitness consequences of competition and economists are centrally concerned with the nature of competition: how the allocation of scarce resources is mediated by potentially complex forms of social interaction and conflicts of interest. We illustrate our argument by focusing on conceptual and empirical approaches to a topic of interest to economists and evolutionary scholars: polygynous marriage. In comparing conceptual approaches, we distinguish between those that emphasise the physical environment and those that emphasise the social environment. We discuss some advantages of analysing marriage through the lens of competitive markets, and outline some of the ways that economists analyse the emergence of rules governing the family. In discussing empirical approaches to polygynous marriage, we describe how a concern for informing contemporary policy leads economists to focus on the consequences of polygyny, and in particular we describe some of the ways in which economists attempt to distinguish causal effects from selection effects.

This article reviews and criticizes Joseph Heath’s market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics. Our criticism is organized into three sections. First, we argue that, even under the ideal assumptions of perfect competition, when markets generate Pareto-efficient distributions, Heath’s approach does not rule out significant harms. Second, we show that, under nonideal conditions, the MFA is either too demanding, if efficiency is to be attained, or not sufficiently demanding, if the goal of Pareto efficiency is abandoned. Finally, we argue that Heath’s appeal to regulations and specific moral requirements as a remedy for market failures is unlikely to safeguard efficiency and exposes a number of general worries regarding the moral force of the MFA. We end this article with a constructive suggestion on how to adjust the MFA to avoid these problems while preserving its contractualist and Paretian spirit.