The Plural Pubmates of Decision Making

This paper (Pirouz, 2007) looks at some seminal studies in neuroeconomics, broaching game-playing, decision-making, and behaviour, but ends up outlining possible applications for consumer theory and marketing strategy.

graduate economics page - aea

the graduate economics page on the AEA webpage is a fairly recent and very welcome development. Some of the stuff here is really great and i would recommend this to all of you who are looking out for post-grad opps. On the academic side, the following literature listing is really good
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA/gradstudents/Education_Issues.htm

Need for Cooperation Between EU's Business, Academic and Govt. Sectors

Issue 4 (March 2007) of the Europe4Researchers Newsletter describes how the EU has five full-time researchers for every nine in the United States and ten in Japan. And that the comparative lack of researchers is particularly visible in business, with almost a third fewer researchers employed in this sector compared to the US!

The irony is that EU countries still produce more science and engineering graduates - including those with PhDs - than the US and Japan. However, unemployment among doctoral researchers in the EU is relatively high, while their salary remains low in comparison to other professionals with a similar education. Why? Europe4Researchers suggests that there is insufficient demand for researchers by the business sector in Europe.

What's clear is that co-operation would be very helpful, across government, academia and the business sector. The business sector may not be hiring PhD's if they are not trained in the right sub-fields of science, engineering and technology or if these PhD's do not have adequate administrative skills, soft skills etc.

If this is the case, then the business sector should send a clear message to academia that the quality of labour supply needs to be improved. If this is not the case, then govt. should impress upon the business sector the importance of hiring PhD's in science, engineering and technology to enable commercialised innovation, patenting and technical progress.

Another question is what is happening to all the EU-produced researchers that can't get a job? A very tentative suggestion is that they are finding employment in the US. This is based on the fact that the US produces less PhD's in these areas than the EU, but somehow has more PhD's working in these areas than the EU.

I came across this article from Wired http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,70487-0.html discusses Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You - which I reviewed here back in the day: http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000687.php Essentially it discusses how computer games designers, no doubt eager to broaden their consumer base, are producing games promoted as cognitive workouts.

I wonder are there products available which aim to modify behaviour in this way. I do know from the cognitive-behavioural therapy point of view, the Fearfighter http://www.fearfighter.com/index.htm program has been introduced to deliver CBT for anxiety disorders and phobia. Has a computer games based approach been tried to modify other behaviours?

Does qualitative research belong in economics?

http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/download_pdf.php?id=1043

ROSLA in the UK?

I don't know the extent to which this announcement ties in with the stated objective of Gordon Brown to target scarce resources at education (this is in light of the proposed rise in UK govt spending by 2% per year from 2008, which is half the rate of growth of the current round). If the rationale is to yield maximum benefit, I presume there's been rigorous costing and forecasting before they announce this emphasis on skills. I don't know if it serves a counterpoint to Ireland's fourth-level investment, but interestingly, skilled workers in manual trades of the former COMECON states are able to enter the UK in large numbers and have indeed done so - is this a new type of technology worker that DfES and the CBI want to produce?

Behavioural Interventions in Organ Donation

A paper in Science from a few years ago "Do Defaults Save Lives?" suggests that automatic enrolment in organ donation programs can increase donations by additional thousands per year.

Myself and Liam's current article in B&F discusses automatic enrolment in savings programs where individuals can "opt-out" of their automatic enrolment.

The Science article is interesting because it applies the automatic enrolment concept to life or death scenarios. In addition, survey respondents were also presented with "opt-in" aswell as "opt-out" scenarios.

In the opt-in scenario, participants were told to assume that they had just moved to a new state where the default was not to be an organ donor, and they were given a choice to confirm or change that status. The opt-out scenario was twice as successful in terms of revealed donation preference.

HIV Intervention in Kenya

A recent Dartmouth paper on HIV Interventions is linked below. While information campaigns have had variable effects, the results here are striking. The idea is that communicating the relative risk of having sex with older men collapsed the rate of pregnancies deriving from sex between younger women and older men. The methodology utilised in this paper should be studied closely.

http://povertyactionlab.org/papers/Dupas_RelativeRisks08.31.06.pdf

laibson paper on not breaking good plans

An interesting recent paper by Laibson that looks at regulations that stop people from deviating from long-term plans on the basis of momentary impulses that they later regret

here

For those of you not familiar with his work, it would be worth going through his papers to familiarise yourself with this work http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/laibson/laibson_published_work.htm

The Psychology of Abusive Behaviour

Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo (who we know from the Zimbardo Time Inventory), has drawn a link between the abusive behaviour conducted three years ago at Abu Gharib, and an experiment he conducted 33 years earlier, where he randomly assigned 24 male college students to be guards or prisoners in a two-week study. He told the guards to keep order, to let nobody escape and to commit no violence. The guards began hitting captives with fists by Day 2. Subsequent behaviour became even more abusive. For more on this story, see here.

Binge drinking highest in Ireland, Britain, Finland, according to EU survey

In a European Union survey on alcohol consumption released yesterday, it was found that almost one in five Europeans between the ages of 15 and 24 drink five or more alcoholic beverages in one session. This is interesting contextualisation for our findings from last springs's survey on student drinking behaviour.

See more about the survey here. The EU poll, which questioned 28,584 people, defined binge drinking as when more than five alcoholic drinks are consumed in the one sitting. This seems to be quite a lenient definition of binge-srinking, assuming that they are not referring to the consumption of five units per sitting.

Volunteers sought for blindness study

A new research group has been set up at WIT and it wants 1,000 volunteers aged between 20 and 40 to be monitored over the next 20 years to find out how best to combat the most common cause of blindness in the Western world. See more here.

Biological Basis For Teenage Mood Swings Found

A study in Nature Neuroscience is thought to be the first to suggest an underlying physiological, as opposed to a behavioural-psychological explanation for teenage mood swings.

Economic Instruments and their validity

The Wall Street Journal printed an article in the February 27th edition, which discussed Cornell University economist Michael Waldman and his paper which linked autism to the amount of television watched by young children. The article had less to do with his findings and more to do with whether or not economic instruments are appropriate tools to study these areas.

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=1223298041&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=4&VInst=
PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1173456662&clientId=13279

Peer review in Nature

Nature conducted an exploratory process of open peer review between June and September 2006, whereby articles were hosted on an open-access server which allowed people to post their comments publicly. 71 articles were reviewed in the traditional way and in the new way: the authors of these articles were surveyed on their views on the benefits of the open peer-review system. When you consider that only 92 comments were posted, and just half of the articles were commented on at all, it's not surprising that the author survey showed a marked preference for the old way of doing things The psychologist, March 2007, Vol 20, no. 3, p. 133.

Is anyone familiar with similar experiments in scientific publishing?

Problem teenagers and family reponse

I liked the way this article addresses whether (often absent) parents will renew efforts to keep their kids on the straight and narrow, or will walk away from them as they may think all is lost:

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/
2007/03/teenage-delinquency-and-absent-fathers.html

Useful entry-level psychology blog

Although I'm stimulated by Nobel Prize winning economists, I'm often confused in trying to make my way through their blogs (probably due to my lack of economics training - sorry all!). I found a decent site that I recommend to students which gently brings them in to thinking a bit more deeply about some uses and coverage of psychology. Worth a look.

http://www.spring.org.uk/

Living with risk

	Larry G. Epstein (University of Rochester)
	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:roc:rocher:534&r=cbe
Living with risk can lead to anticipatory feelings such as anxiety or hopefulness. Such feelings can a¤ect the choice between lotteries that will be played out in the future - choice may be motivated not only by the (static) risks involved but also by the desire to reduce anxiety or to promote savoring. This paper provides a model of preference in a three-period setting that is axiomatic and includes a role for anticipatory feelings. It is shown that the model of preference can accommodate intuitive patterns of demand for information such as information seeking when a favorable outcome is very likely and information aversion when it is more likely that the outcome will be unfavorable. Behavioral meaning is given to statements such as "individual 1 is anxious" and "2 is more anxious than 1". Finally, the model is di¤erentiated sharply from the classic model due to Kreps and Porteus.

Addicts underestimate the power of their own cravings

Sated drug addicts who have just had a hit, underestimate the influence their craving will have on them in the future, researchers have shown. The finding echoes similar research showing that when we're in a satisfied state we underestimate the motivational force of hunger, thirst and sexual desire.
"Our results suggest that addicts under-appreciate the effects of deprivation when they are not actually deprived", the researchers said. This tendency to underestimate the power of craving could help explain why people start to take drugs which they've been warned will be highly addictive.
____________________________________

Badger, G.J., Bickel, W.K., Giordano, L.A., Jacobs, E.A., Loewenstein, G. &
Marsch, L. (2007). Altered states: The impact of immediate craving on the
valuation of current and future opioids. Journal of Health Economics, In
Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2007.01.002

Peer Effects and Decision-Making

Found a really good blog today: "New Economist"

The most recent post is about the effects of peer pressure on subject choice. Its based on an article by Giacomo De Giorgi (Stanford), Michele Pellizzari (IGIER-Bocconi) and Silvia Redaelli (Bocconi) which is called Be As Careful of the Books You Read as of the Company You Keep. Evidence on Peer Effects in Educational Choices

These authors identify the endoegenous effect of peers on decision-making and do so at what seems to be the cutting edge in the literature. They also document their work in a very clearly written paper, so it's a must-read.