The aim of this article is to describe the rise and fall of the workhouse system in connection with the developments that took place in economic thought, in the transition from Mercantilism to pre-classical and classical tradition. By examining the economic arguments emerging from the debate...

The main objective of this paper is to discuss the role of evaluative incompleteness in the work of Amartya Sen. In section 2, we consider Sen’s distinction between optimising or perfect choices and maximising or acceptable choices, showing it is based on a restrictive interpretation of...

According to Plato, thymòs – a notion denoting the human need for recognition – triggers off the most powerful and overwhelming human passions. Indeed, any action originated and nurtured by thymòtic passions places its own raison d’être in itself. The acts motivated by thymòs can...

This article discusses Alvin Roth’s research about moneyless markets, and in particular about the manner in which kidneys are allocated to patients needing transplants. As Titmuss pointed out for blood transfusions, providing monetary incentives to blood donors may crowd out supply, since...

This paper studies the strategies employed by Catholic and Protestant nonprofit hospitals in Germany and traces them back to the theological foundations of those religions, which shape managers' values. We find that Catholic nonprofit hospitals follow a strategy of horizontal diversification and...

There are no generally accepted results regarding the objectives, decisions, and economic outcomes of nonprofit organizations, as compared to for-profit or public firms. We posit that this inconclusiveness is due to a too broad definition of nonprofits and that different types of nonprofits...

This note is concerned with qualitative restrictions on individual binary preferences of decision makers over profiles of individual actions to account for intersubjective sensitivity to welfare, or preferences, of others, when numerical representations by utility functions fail, due to...