Long Weekend Links

1. TED Interview from a few months back with Julian Assange, explaining the philosophy behind Wikileaks. There has been a lot of discussion about the implication of the development of volunteer-driven mass collaborative enterprises for standard economics. But it is arguable that the development of wikileaks is a more profound development than previous collaborative exercises. This is a global information resource driven by volunteers and donations, with some of the providers taking enormous risks to make information available.

2. On the theme of global developments driven by non-standard preferences, this TED talk from the founder of kiva.org is well worth watching (warning: contains a lot of emotional pleas that may be unsuitable for an older and more cynical audience).

3. DG Sanco Conference on "Behavioural Economics. So What: Should PolicyMakers Care". This will be livestreamed is worth tuning in to.

"At European level, behavioural economics is implicitly starting to be incorporated in policymaking and this has led to some cases of debiasing through law. The cooling-off period, found in much of EU consumer acquis, and the health claims proposal are two significant examples. In addition, an in-depth review of the behavioural literature provided evidence for the inclusion of a ban on pre-checked boxes in the recent proposal for a Consumer Rights Directive. Finally, the useful contribution of behavioural economics has explicitly been recognised by DG Competition as part of the solution in a recent Microsoft case, when designing the browser ballot box. Similarly, Regulatory bodies across of the world (e.g., US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), UK Office for Fair Trading, OECD, Australian Productivity Commission) have already started to take behavioural economics into serious consideration and have already carried out behavioural studies to inform some of their regulatory policies."

4. Programme for AEA 2011 is available on this link

5. Meier and Springer - Discounting and Defaulting: Evidence from Choice Experiments Matched to Administrative Credit Data

6. Brigitte Madrian NBER summary of savings and investment behaviour