IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2003.05441.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Can Society Function Without Ethical Agents? An Informational Perspective

Author

Listed:
  • Bruno Strulovici

Abstract

Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is cheap to manipulate, produced sequentially, and these individuals are devoid of ethical motive. The answer depends on an "information attrition" condition pertaining to the amount of evidence available which distinguishes, for example, between reproducible scientific evidence and the evidence generated in a crime. Applications to institution enforcement, social cohesion, scientific progress, and historical revisionism are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Bruno Strulovici, 2020. "Can Society Function Without Ethical Agents? An Informational Perspective," Papers 2003.05441, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2003.05441
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.05441
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Leonid Hurwicz, 2008. "But Who Will Guard the Guardians?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(3), pages 577-585, June.
    2. Paul R. Milgrom & Douglass C. North & Barry R. Weingast*, 1990. "The Role Of Institutions In The Revival Of Trade: The Law Merchant, Private Judges, And The Champagne Fairs," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 2(1), pages 1-23, March.
    3. Levine, David K. & Modica, Salvatore, 2016. "Peer discipline and incentives within groups," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 19-30.
    4. Gary S. Becker & George J. Stigler, 1974. "Law Enforcement, Malfeasance, and Compensation of Enforcers," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 3(1), pages 1-18, January.
    5. Hurwicz, Leonid, 1973. "The Design of Mechanisms for Resource Allocation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 63(2), pages 1-30, May.
    6. Glazer, Jacob & Rubinstein, Ariel, 1998. "Motives and Implementation: On the Design of Mechanisms to Elicit Opinions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 79(2), pages 157-173, April.
    7. Myerson, Roger B., 2006. "Federalism and Incentives for Success of Democracy," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 1(1), pages 3-23, January.
    8. William M. Landes, 1974. "An Economic Analysis of the Courts," NBER Chapters, in: Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment, pages 164-214, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Roger Myerson, 2009. "Fundamental theory of institutions: a lecture in honor of Leo Hurwicz," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 13(1), pages 59-75, April.
    10. David Rahman, 2012. "But Who Will Monitor the Monitor?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(6), pages 2767-2797, October.
    11. Bikhchandani, Sushil & Hirshleifer, David & Welch, Ivo, 1992. "A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change in Informational Cascades," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(5), pages 992-1026, October.
    12. Jean Tirole, 2006. "The Theory of Corporate Finance," Post-Print hal-00173191, HAL.
    13. Abhijit V. Banerjee, 1992. "A Simple Model of Herd Behavior," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 107(3), pages 797-817.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Charles Angelucci & Antonio Russo, 2022. "Petty Corruption And Citizen Reports," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 63(2), pages 831-848, May.
    2. Daniel Barron & Yingni Guo, 0. "The Use and Misuse of Coordinated Punishments," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 136(1), pages 471-504.
    3. Harry Pei & Bruno Strulovici, 2020. "Crime Aggregation, Deterrence, and Witness Credibility," Papers 2009.06470, arXiv.org.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Aldashev, Gani & Zanarone, Giorgio, 2017. "Endogenous enforcement institutions," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 128(C), pages 49-64.
    2. Levin, Dan & Peck, James, 2008. "Investment dynamics with common and private values," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 143(1), pages 114-139, November.
    3. Roger Myerson, 2009. "Fundamental theory of institutions: a lecture in honor of Leo Hurwicz," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 13(1), pages 59-75, April.
    4. Ottaviani, Marco & Sorensen, Peter, 2001. "Information aggregation in debate: who should speak first?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(3), pages 393-421, September.
    5. Paul A. Pavlou & Angelika Dimoka, 2006. "The Nature and Role of Feedback Text Comments in Online Marketplaces: Implications for Trust Building, Price Premiums, and Seller Differentiation," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 17(4), pages 392-414, December.
    6. Alistair Wilson, 2011. "Costly Communication in Groups: Theory and an Experiment," Working Paper 488, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, revised Jul 2012.
    7. Elchanan Mossel & Allan Sly & Omer Tamuz, 2015. "Strategic Learning and the Topology of Social Networks," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 83(5), pages 1755-1794, September.
    8. Michiel Bijlsma & Wim Suyker, 2008. "The credit crisis and the Dutch economy... in eight frequently asked questions," CPB Memorandum 210.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    9. Michiel Bijlsma & Jeroen Klomp & Sijmen Duineveld, 2010. "Systemic risk in the financial sector; a review and synthesis," CPB Document 210.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    10. Hahn, Volker, 2011. "Sequential aggregation of verifiable information," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(11), pages 1447-1454.
    11. Gabrielle Demange, 2018. "Mechanisms in a Digitalized World," CESifo Working Paper Series 6984, CESifo.
    12. Kox, Henk L.M. & Leeuwen, George van, 2012. "Dynamic market selection in EU business services," MPRA Paper 41016, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Gu, Chen & Guo, Xu & Zhang, Chengping, 2022. "Analyst target price revisions and institutional herding," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    14. Ruomeng Cui & Dennis J. Zhang & Achal Bassamboo, 2019. "Learning from Inventory Availability Information: Evidence from Field Experiments on Amazon," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(3), pages 1216-1235, March.
    15. Jonas Hedlund & Carlos Oyarzun, 2018. "Imitation in heterogeneous populations," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 65(4), pages 937-973, June.
    16. Cao, Melanie & Shi, Shouyong, 2006. "Signaling in the Internet craze of initial public offerings," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 818-833, September.
    17. Wei He & Qian Wang, 2020. "The peer effect of corporate financial decisions around split share structure reform in China," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 38(3), pages 474-493, July.
    18. Kraemer, Carlo & Noth, Markus & Weber, Martin, 2006. "Information aggregation with costly information and random ordering: Experimental evidence," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 59(3), pages 423-432, March.
    19. Fishman, Arthur & Fishman, Ram & Gneezy, Uri, 2019. "A tale of two food stands: Observational learning in the field," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 159(C), pages 101-108.
    20. Cavatorta, Elisa & Guarino, Antonio & Huck, Steffen, 2024. "Social learning with partial and aggregate information: Experimental evidence," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 146(C), pages 292-307.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2003.05441. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.