Philemon and Baucis Death? Two cases of double deaths of married couples

When two human corpses are found in temporal and locational context the assumption of a non-natural cause of death is close at hand. Suicide, extended suicide, homicide or accident (particularly with carbon monoxide) come to mind. When, however, a natural cause of death emerges for both after autopsy and further examinations, this provokes the question whether this incidence is coincidental. In our two presented cases, a married couple each was found dead together. In both cases, the wife needed nursing and was being cared for by a husband who died of cardiac disease shortly before the wife died. In one case, the wife died of acute uncompensated chronic congestive heart failure. In the other case, the cause of death of the wife was hypovolemic shock due to acute gastrointestinal bleeding from recurrent gastric mucosal erosion. It is to be discussed for both cases whether, given the pre-existing illness, the acute stress of the situation in view to the husbands' death may at least have favored the occurrence of death and may, thus, have led to the criminologically conspicuous situation of finding.     

In Praise of the Commons: Another Case Study

Common-pool allocation systems do not have the best of reputations in economic literature, since they are normally connected with the dissipation of rents. The present case study argues that in the case of procurement and allocation of human organ transplants a reciprocal common-pool allocation system is superior other systems, including market allocation.     

Sensitivity to befallen injustice and reactions to unfair treatment in a laboratory situation

At Time 1, 171 students were administered questionnaires for measuring sensitivity to befallen injustice (SBI), trait anger, anger in, anger out, anger control, self-assertiveness, and attitudes toward principles of distributive justice (equality of chances, equity). Two months later (Time 2), 75 of these subjects were treated unfairly in a laboratory situation dealing with competition and achievement behavior. Two justice principles were violated: the equality of chances principle and the equity principle. Four weeks later (Time 3), 32 subjects evaluated the unfair treatment in retrospect. All three occasions were presented as independent studies with the subjects perceiving no connection between them. In line with our hypotheses, we found that immediate and delayed reactions to the unjust treatments depended to a considerable degree on SBI. For example, the combined score of the SBI questionnaire predicted, with a beta weight of .71, a combined rating of three experts who used various sources of objective information (e.g., tape-recorded interactions between subject and experimenter) to estimate the degree to which the subject displayed emotional, verbal, and behavioral resentment against the unfair treatment. At the same time, measures for other constructs (e.g., assertiveness, trait anger, anger expression), which can also be linked theoretically to the criteria, explained either none or a much smaller proportion of variance in reactions to unjust treatment.     

Fighting pollution when decisions are strategic

In this paper we analyse anti-pollution policies in a 2-by-2 game played between a “polluter” and the “police” in which the payoffs can be manipulated by an exogenous third player called the “policy-maker.” We show that the efficiency of the policies may depend on whether the players of the 2-by-2 game choose Nash equilibrium strategies or prefer maximin.     

Literatur

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