Joe Oppenheimer - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Joe Oppenheimer

Ethic@: an International Journal for Moral Philosophy, Aug 4, 2011

Global Justice is a fascinating and powerful work about what can and ought to be done to achieve ... more Global Justice is a fascinating and powerful work about what can and ought to be done to achieve a better future for our species. Built on a Rawlsian styled thought experiment and supported by empirical reporting, the book presents a "basic framework of governing the world's inhabitants" (p. 50).Brock invites her readers to imagine a situation in which delegates from the peoples of the world meet to agree on principles of international justice but are impartial because they remain ignorant of their initial social position and interests. That is, they operate behind a "veil of ignorance" that induces impartiality. Global Justice extends the Rawlsian framework to the entire global community in innovative ways and applies it to important policy questions. Brock advocates a trans-boundary, trans-cultural moral concern for others (referred to as "global cosmopolitanism") against a more traditional notion that our moral obligations are primarily to those in our own group, community, or country (referred to as "liberal nationalism"). As in Rawls's Justice as Fairness, there are two sorts of implications reached from the impartial reasoning within the original position: one concerns rights and liberties, the other concerns the distribution of economic welfare. In this review I will touch upon three aspects of her analysis: distributive justice, rights and liberties, and the role of nationalism in moral theorizing about global justice.

Without my having worked on these problems with Norman Frohlich this essay would have been imposs... more Without my having worked on these problems with Norman Frohlich this essay would have been impossible. Finally, the institutional support from the University of Maryland, and the financial backing of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, were very helpful.

In "Skating on Thin Ice," Frohlich and Oppenheimer (2006) describe a phenomenon they observed in ... more In "Skating on Thin Ice," Frohlich and Oppenheimer (2006) describe a phenomenon they observed in laboratory experiments on the production of public goods that is rarely discussed in the literature. They report individual contributions to the public good are often inconsistent over time, appearing to fluctuate between two distinct contribution levels. Although they conjecture that individuals have complex context-dependent preferences, they did not develop a full specification of the theory. We develop an agent-based simulation of these conjectures, provide a possible specification of a theory of complex context-dependent preferences, and demonstrate how this theory can, in fact, generate the pattern of contributions observed by Frohlich and Oppenheimer. We then conduct sensitivity analyses, examining the behavior generated by fourteen scenarios. Two main theories are considered: that inconsistent contributions arise either from a deterministic avoidance of exploitation or from a probabilistic response to exploitation. The former theory clearly fails, the latter theory, under certain conditions, does produce the observed pattern of contributions. Two simple alternative theories are also considered, that of a highly-stylized "probabilistic guilt" and of goal-oriented but non-utility maximizing behavior (with stable preferences). Both alternatives, under certain conditions, are also able to generate the observed pattern. We develop an analysis of situations in which the predictions of these theories diverge and suggest that one could discriminate between them in laboratory settings. Finally, we consider a possibly fruitful relationship between simulation and experimentation to consider the implications of one's models and conjectures.

a. This work was greatly assisted by the opportunity we had to work with Gillian Brock, at the Un... more a. This work was greatly assisted by the opportunity we had to work with Gillian Brock, at the University of Auckland. She had the insight to push the literature on needs into our framework, and the Auckland Philosophy Department afforded us a wonderful environment to consider these questions. Earlier, our work with Eduardo Frajman was crucial in developing our thinking regarding the relation between democracies and welfare. The Universities of Manitoba, Maryland and Montreal all have helped support this research over various time periods, as has the SSRC. Comments by Karol Soltan, Peter Levine and other members of the Maryland CP4 Workshop were very helpful.

People have claimed to understand the empirical and moral principles of politics for thousands of... more People have claimed to understand the empirical and moral principles of politics for thousands of years. These assertions have never escaped contention. This book is about some of the empirical and moral generalizations arrived at with the tools that comprise what might be called the new political science. The book deals with the findings directly. It also explores how one justifies such claims. It reveals how the quality of the justification helps to determine the quality of the claims. The foundations used to develop the arguments, or justifications, are those of rational choice and social justice theories. But one usually needs more than reason to establish (or, for that matter, to disestablish) claims of knowledge about politics. Empirical findings, especially those gleaned from careful laboratory experiments, are introduced to help the reader evaluate the validity of the claims. The principles discussed improve our understanding of concepts such as social welfare, collective action, altruism, distributive justice, group interest, democratic performance, and more. The methods employed help us understand what is universal to all of politics. This volume zeros in on these universals with an eye to both the empirical problems and the normative conundrums of politics.

Privatization and Entrepreneurship, 2018

Simulation & Gaming, 1997

Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values and his related writings are best known in Po... more Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values and his related writings are best known in Political Science for demonstrating the impossibility of constructing an ideal democratic procedure for aggregating individual choices. A broad concern for the relationship between individual values, individual limitations and the quality of social life underlies his work. Arrow builds on the notion that to tie social welfare to democratic political decisions one must both be concerned with questions of aggregation, and also have a firm understanding of individual choice. Hence, his careful delineation of the meaning of preferences, his identification of desiderata for social welfare functions, and his subsequent inclusion of principles of distributive justice in his analysis of social welfare functions (or constitutions, as he was to come to call them). Thus Arrow's work on social choice and social welfare intersects the agenda of modern political science and traditional political philosophy at a number of crucial junctures. Recent work in related fields raises questions regarding the uniqueness and stability of preferences and hence requires a substantial reformulation of the theoretical underpinnings of the field. Specifically, research in cognitive psychology indicates that preferences over outcomes is determined by framing, or cues. Expressions of preferences over a set of alternatives can only be understood when relativized to various sets of cues. The epistemological and normative interpretation of such revealed preferences, and in particular the question of which preferences are to be counted and aggregated becomes problematic. Arrow's discussion of individual preferences and the existence of a 'universal set': a homogeneous preference structure for all individuals, furnishes the impetus for an examination of the issues raised by framing. His discussion of questions of distributive justice, along with recent experimental results, lead us to propose some selection criteria for which preferences ought to be taken into account in justifiable social choice mechanisms. In particular, an impartial perspective seems a strong candidate as an appropriate viewpoint for eliciting preferences. Finally, we consider a few implications of the discussion for evaluating political institutions. Seriously: Conversations with Nobelists about Economics and Political Science. James Alt, Elinor Ostrom, and Margaret Levi (eds.). (Russell Sage Foundation, New York). 2/ We are deeply indebted to Michael Cain for his extensive and most helpful comments of an earlier draft. We are grateful to others including Keith Dougherty, who also gave us helpful comments.

Operational Research and the Social Sciences, 1989

We analyze results from laboratory experiments which bear on the relationship between participati... more We analyze results from laboratory experiments which bear on the relationship between participation in redistributional decisions and subsequent attitudes and behavior. In particular, we examine the impact of democratic participation on the subsequent acceptability of a redistributive principle and on the productivity of participants. We believe the experiments have implications for the role of worker participation in economic enterprises and for the relationship between income distribution policies, economic incentives, and political processes.

Simulation & Gaming, 1999

Simulations and experiments are often assumed to lead to outcomes strictly on the basis of their ... more Simulations and experiments are often assumed to lead to outcomes strictly on the basis of their design. The authors argue that one can learn a lot about the reasons for the outcomes, the subjects’ views of their experiences, and hence about external validity, by asking debriefing questions. This is a lesson that many researchers have not yet taken to heart.

Public Choice, 1990

In order to maximize votes, incumbent politicians design and implement redistributional programs.... more In order to maximize votes, incumbent politicians design and implement redistributional programs. These programs benefit some voters at the expense of others. In the simple two group (or tax payers and beneficiaries) case we identify the nature of vote maximizing transfer policies. This model's basic approach is shown to hold for multiple group models as well. Strategic implications for the organizers of sub groups of the population (or group leaders) are developed. Other extensions of the model are discussed. qu]Where the budget is clever is in its detail. Each little measure is designed to hurt (but not too much) people who are not politically important, while tossing a bone to people who are. You can see this in a host of different ways.

Stanford University Press eBooks, 2004

... List of Tables viii Preface ix 1. Rational Choice and Politics IRWIN L. MORRIS AND JOE A. OPP... more ... List of Tables viii Preface ix 1. Rational Choice and Politics IRWIN L. MORRIS AND JOE A. OPPENHEIMER I Part I. From Anarchy to Society ... rule in one dimension 15 1.2 Modeling a legislative committee's strategy for writing a bill 17 1.3 Majority rule when preferences are single ...

… Behavioral Economics And Experimental Economics of …, 2007

World Politics, 1972

While engineers, economists, and doctors can often prescribe a remedy for an undesirable situatio... more While engineers, economists, and doctors can often prescribe a remedy for an undesirable situation by inference from a general theoretical construct, the architects of foreign policies rarely, if ever, have had such an advantage. Yet, the availability of a general theoretical construct could yield numerous benefits. To the degree that the theory were reliable and general, the foreign-policy maker would be able to deal with a wide range of concerns with confidence, at a minimum cost. For such a theory would allow him to know precisely what information would be needed to analyze the situation and how the information could be used to infer a prescription which would, with a high probability, get the desired results.

Public Choice, 1996

Subjects play a 5-person Prisoner's Dilemma both from an impartial point of view and in a regular... more Subjects play a 5-person Prisoner's Dilemma both from an impartial point of view and in a regular fashion to determine whether 1) Concerns for fairness increase cooperative behavior; 2) Play of a Prisoner's Dilemma from an impartial point of view results in significantly higher levels of cooperation than does normal play; 3) Concern for fairness has greater explanatory force in explaining cooperation in impartial plays of the Prisoner's Dilemma than in normal plays; and 4) Experience with impartial play of a Prisoner's Dilemma sensitizes subjects to normative imperatives and results in higher levels of cooperation in subsequent normal plays of Prisoner's Dilemmas. The first and second hypotheses are supported, the third is inverted, and the fourth is not supported. Concern for fairness is demonstrated to play a complex role in explaining cooperative behavior in regular plays of the game. * We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting this work. We also owe thanks to Avery Cook for his help in running the experiments, and David Manry and Stergios Skaperdikas for comments on an early draft of this paper.

Managerial and Decision Economics, 1998

Abstract Full employee ownership, under which employees enjoy dominant ownership and control righ... more Abstract Full employee ownership, under which employees enjoy dominant ownership and control rights, is an innovation which alters the relationship between employees and the organization in which they work. Although it has been hypothesized to have a number of ...

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1984

The existence and prevalence of behavior inconsistent with economists' definition of self-int... more The existence and prevalence of behavior inconsistent with economists' definition of self-interest is measured in an experimental context. Experimental situations involving choices with monetary payoffs are designed to induce preferences. The subjects' behaviors are used to measure the existence and intensity of various forms of motivation based on “interactive preference functions.” Explicitly, we test for altruistic, egalitarian, and difference maximizing behaviors. Attempts to explain the nonself-interested choices by psychological and ideological constructs are not successful but statistical relationships between these choices and partisan political preferences are found.