Tiziano Raffaelli

Game theory has proved to be a powerful research tool both in the social and in the natural sciences. Originally confined to the strategy of pure conflict, in zero-sum games, its field of application has been extended to cooperation, coordination and the whole range of strategic interactions in which conflict and cooperation coexist. One of its main achievements is a better understanding of how these interactions evolve and tend to become stable. Since it deals with the anticipation of each other’s behaviour, love seems to be a promising field of analysis. And indeed, interesting research has been done on gift giving, commitment, strategies for mate choice, and other issues. The aim of this paper is to call attention to some of these recent developments

Alfred Marshall's ethics, critically examined by Parsons in the 1930s and often the target of unfair remarks in the past, has become the object of more sympathetic and detailed studies in recent years. These studies have tried to redress the balance that had been upset by routine criticisms, and to prove that Marshall's interest in ethics was neither lip-service to conventional morality nor uncritical acceptance thereof. Moreover, they have vindicated Marshall's claim that his economics, though unconnected to any ethical philosophy, was still one of the moral sciences, inseparable from ethical considerations