Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Ethics and Market Design by Shengwu Li

Here's a take on an important and elusive question, by someone well qualified to discuss both ethics and market design. (That said, I have no expectation of ever seeing the last word on this particular subject, and that seems to be Shengwu's position too...)

Ethics and Market Design, by Shengwu Li
forthcoming, Oxford Review of Economic Policy

The paper begins with these two quotes:

[. . . ] just as there is a chemical engineering literature (and not just literature about theoretical and laboratory chemistry) and a medical literature (and not just a biology literature), economists need to develop a scientific literature concerned with practical problems of design. (Roth and Peranson, 1999)

It is, in fact, arguable that economics has had two rather different origins [. . . ] concerned respectively with ‘ethics’ on the one hand, and with what may be called ‘engineering’ on the other. (Sen, 1987) 

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