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This book is aimed at analyzing the foundations of medical ethics by considering different moral theories and their implications for judgments in clinical practice and policy-making. It provides a review of the major types of ethical theory that can be applied to medical and bioethical issues concerning reproductive genetics. In response to the debate on the most adequate ethical doctrine to guide biomedical decisions, this book formulates views that capture the best elements in each, bearing in mind their differences and taking into account the specific character of medicine. No historically influential position in ethics is by itself adequate to be applied to reproductive decisions. Thus, this book attempts to offer a pluralistic approach to biomedical research and medical practice. One usually claims that there are some basic principles (non-maleficence, beneficence, confidentiality, autonomy, and justice) which constitute the foundations of bioethics and medical ethics. Yet these principles conflict with each other and one needs some criteria to solve these conflicts and to specify the scope of application of these principles. Exploring miscellaneous ethical approaches as introduced to biomedicine, particularly to reproductive genetics, the book shall elucidate their different assumptions concerning human nature and the relations between healthcare providers, recipients, and other affected parties (e.g. progeny, relatives, other patients, society). The book attempts to answer the question of whether the tension between these ethical doctrines generates conflict in the field of biomedicine or if these competing approaches could in some way complement each other. In this respect, lecturers and researchers in bioethics would be interested in this reading this book

Despite several studies on the supreme audit institutions (SAIs), the research question of what maximises SAI auditors' utility remains unanswered. Since SAIs are key public suppliers of audit services, it is essential to determine how they perform their duties and obligations to the stakeholders. This paper follows the grounded theory paradigm using qualitative and quantitative methods. This study is pioneering in many ways because the motivation of SAI's auditors is rarely the subject of research. We formulate the model of SAI's utility and determine the SAI auditor's motivators. The study results prove that SAIs seek to impose their system of preferences through audits and derive usefulness from this. From a long-term perspective, this may lead to a negative autonomy of SAI. Additionally, the study reveals that auditors strive to maximise monetary income and perceive employment stability as a motivational factor. However, job stability could lead to lower auditors' engagement during the audits. The study proposes a pay-for-performance system, which does not reduce the auditor's motivation linked with job stability and simultaneously encourages auditors to achieve better job results. This study contributes to a better understanding of the problems associated with interactions of public officials inside the state.

Contents -- Contributors -- Preface -- Part One: Historical Overview -- 1. The Fall and Rise of Psychological Explanations in the Economics of Intertemporal Choice - George Loewenstein -- 2. Intertemporal Choice and Political Thought - Jon Elster -- Part Two: General Perspectives -- 3. Hyperbolic Discounting - George Ainslie and Nick Haslam -- 4. Irrationality, Impulziveness, and Selfishness as Discount Reversal Effects - Howard Rachlin and Andres Raineri -- 5. Anomalies in Intertemporal Choice: Evidence and an Interpretation - George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec

Introduction -- Models and structures -- The structuralist view of theories -- Idealization and concretization -- Measurement -- A general concept of an economy -- Preference and utility -- The logical structure of game theory -- Abstract labor and labor value -- Classical economics -- The logical structure of Sraffian economic theory -- The logical structure of econometrics -- References -- Index

Preface -- From the first edition -- Probability distributions -- Conditional probability -- Laws of probability -- Theory of risk and utility -- State price and risk-neutral probability -- Single period asset pricing models -- Stochastic processes and martingales -- Dynamic programming and multi-period asset pricing -- Continuous-time asset pricing model -- Continuous-time option pricing -- Hedging and more option pricing -- Brownian motion and technical trading -- Theory of markov chains and credit markets -- Interest rate modeling and derivatives -- Risk measures -- Appendix -- Index

Political psychologists have been quick to use prospect theory in their work, realizing its potential for explaining decisions under risk. Applying prospect theory to political decision-making is not without problems, though, and here we address two of these: (1) Does prospect theory actually apply to political decision-makers, or are politicians unlike the rest of us? (2) Which dimension do politicians use as their reference point when there are multiple dimensions (e.g., votes and policy)? We address both problems in an experiment with a unique sample of Dutch members of parliament as participants. We use well-known (incentivized) decision situations and newly developed hypothetical political decision-making scenarios. Our results indicate that politicians' deviate from expected utility theory in the direction predicted by prospect theory but that these deviations are somewhat smaller than those of other people. Votes appear to be a more important determinant of politicians' reference point than is policy.