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Suppose an agent is choosing between rescuing more people with a lower probability of success, and rescuing fewer with a higher probability of success. How should they choose? Our moral judgments about such cases are not well-studied, unlike the closely analogous non-moral preferences over monetary gambles. In this paper, I present an empirical study which aims to elicit the moral analogues of our risk preferences, and to assess whether one kind of evidence—concerning how they depend on outcome probabilities—can debunk them. I find significant heterogeneity in our moral risk preferences—in particular, moral risk-seeking and risk-neutrality are surprisingly popular. I also find that subjects' judgments aren't probability-dependent, thus providing an empirical defense against debunking arguments from probability dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper we analyze a contractual relation between two economic agents concerning an action or a decision to be taken. This approach corresponds to the Principal-Agent model, analyzed both in the case of symmetric information and in the case of asymmetric information (the moral hazard model). We suppose that the two partners are risk neutral and we determine the features of the optimal contract to be signed by these economic agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Give a risk-neutral investor the choice to acquire a costly signal prior to asset market equilibrium. She refuses to pay for the signal under general conditions. The reason is that a risk-neutral investor is indifferent between a risky asset or a safe bond in optimum and expects the same return to her portfolio ex ante, whether or not she acquires information. Risk neutrality thus implies the absence of costly information from asset price in competitive asset markets. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]