Repugnance: two overviews (one by humans, one by Ai)

Here are two overviews of repugnance, one by economists in a forthcoming book chapter, and one from xAi via its large language model, in Grokipedia.

First, here's the human report, by three veteran scholars of repugnant transactions and controversial markets:

 The Morality of Market Exchanges: Between Societal Values and Tradeoffs   by Julio J. Elias, Nicola Lacetera & Mario Macis
NBER Working Paper 34647 DOI 10.3386/w34647  January 2026

"Certain behaviors in markets are unambiguously unethical. In other cases, however, voluntary exchanges that can create gains from trade remain contested on moral grounds, because of what is traded or of the price at which the exchange occurs. This chapter offers a framework to analyze these contested markets and provides examples of two general instances. First, we examine “repugnant” transactions involving the human body—such as compensated organ donation and gestational surrogacy—where concerns about dignity, exploitation, and inequality conflict with welfare gains from expanding supply. Second, we study price gouging in emergencies, where demands for a “just price” clash with the incentive and allocation roles of price adjustments under scarcity. Across both cases, we synthesize evidence on societal attitudes and highlight how support for policy options depends on perceived trade-offs between autonomy, fairness and efficiency, and on institutional features that can separate compensation from allocation."
 

And here's the first sentence of a long overview of repugnance at Grokipedia, an Ai generated encyclopedia launched in October 2025:

Repugnancy costs
"Repugnancy costs denote the multifaceted disutilities—including reputational harm, social sanctions, moral distress, and enforcement expenses—that emerge when voluntary transactions clash with dominant cultural or ethical norms, effectively rationing or prohibiting markets even among consenting parties. "