Valuing a homeland security policy: Countermeasures for the threats from shoulder mounted missiles

This paper reports estimates for the ex ante tradeoffs for three specific homeland security policies that all address a terrorist attack on commercial aircraft with shoulder mounted missiles. Our analysis focuses on the willingness to pay for anti-missile laser jamming countermeasures mounted on commercial aircraft compared with two other policies as well as the prospect of remaining with the status quo. Our findings are based a stated preference conjoint survey conducted in 2006 and administered to a sample from Knowledge Networks’ national internet panel. The estimates range from $100 to $220 annually per household. Von Winterfeldt and O’Sullivan’s (2006) analysis of the same laser jamming plan suggests that the countermeasures would be preferred if economic losses are above $74 billion, the probability of attack is larger than 0.37 in 10 years, and if the cost of the measures is less than about $14 billion. Our results imply that, using the most conservative of our estimates, a program with a cost consistent with their thresholds would yield significant aggregate net benefits.

Taste uncertainty and status quo effects in consumer choice

We use reference-dependent expected utility theory to develop a model of status quo effects in consumer choice. We hypothesise that, when making their decisions, individuals are uncertain about the utility that will be yielded by their consumption experiences in different ‘taste states’ of the world. If individuals have asymmetric attitudes to gains and losses of utility, the model entails acyclic reference-dependent preferences over consumption bundles. The model explains why status quo effects may vary substantially from one decision context to another and why some such effects may decay as individuals gain market experience.     

Status quo bias in decision making

Most real decisions, unlike those of economics texts, have a status quo alternative—that is, doing nothing or maintaining one's current or previous decision. A series of decision-making experiments shows that individuals disproportionately stick with the status quo. Data on the selections of health plans and retirement programs by faculty members reveal that the status quo bias is substantial in important real decisions. Economics, psychology, and decision theory provide possible explanations for this bias. Applications are discussed ranging from marketing techniques, to industrial organization, to the advance of science.     

Understanding 'Going Missing': issues for social work and social services

Correspondence to Malcolm Payne, Professor of Applied Community Studies, The Manchester Metropolitan University, 799 Wilmslow Road, Didsbury, Manchester M20 8RR. Summary Recent research about young people and adults who ‘gomissing’ raises important issues for social work and thesocial services. Large numbers of young people go missing eachyear, becoming vulnerable to exploitation and at risk of committingcrime and suffering from other social difficulties. Adults leavebehind families with practical and emotional difficulties. Adefinition of ‘going missing’ should focus on absencefrom social expectations and responsibilities. Five groups ofmissing person are identified: runaways, pushaways, throwaways,fallaways and takeaways, reflecting different social situationsin which going missing occurs. It is argued that going missingis one of a range of choices which people in difficulties maymake, depending on their approach to problems in their livesand the availability of opportunities. Effective local co-ordinationto focus on reasons for going missing, on reunions and returnsto residential care or home, and to provide emotional and practicalhelp to people ‘left behind’, are required, providedthat care is taken to protect people who go missing becausethey are subject to abuse and violence.     

Mouthing Disgust and Pleasure in Eating Disorders

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex sensorial encounters that people with eating disorders have in response to their mouths, food, eating, and embodiment. We argue that relationships to food, perceived primarily in clinical and psychological terms of control and discipline, ignore sensorial and generative dimensions of embodiment and the associated affective agency of hungers, pleasures, and disgust. Through analysis of the filmed performance of Untitled (The Party), we examine how the mouth for people with eating disorders embodies a metaphorical space of disgust, but also pleasure. As a soft, moist bodily opening, the mouth presents a symbolic space that can be filled with sensorial engagements of touch, disgust, pleasure, and taste. It is through the materiality of cream as used in the performance, and Irigaray's morphological mediation of bodily dimensions and language via the mucous touch, that we present new sensorial engagements with eating disorders.     

Risk aversion and physical prowess: Prediction,choice and bias

This paper reports on experiments where individuals are asked to make risky decisions for themselves, and to predict the risky decisions of others. Prior research shows that people predict women to be more risk averse than men, a result we confirm. We investigate whether differences in physical prowess underlie actual and perceived gender differences, a hypothesis suggested by both evolutionary and economic theories. Overall we find that perceptions of others’ risk attitudes reflect stereotypes about gender and strength but tend to exaggerate the underlying relationships. Physically stronger and taller people and those perceived as attractive are predicted to be more risk tolerant, while women are perceived to be more risk averse. The impact of gender and physical prowess measures on actual gamble choices is much weaker. Sources of prediction bias are examined, showing that specific characteristics of the target and predictor lead to systematic over-prediction or under-prediction of risk aversion.     

Life after work: older Australians' experiences of early exit from the workforce

Little is known about the experience of those in the baby boom cohort who are outside the labour market. Understanding their experience has the potential to inform policy strategies to support older people to remain longer in the workforce. Using in‐depth interview data from 26 participants, this paper examines the reasons people aged between 50 and 64 years give for being not‐employed, how they perceive it affects their health, how socioeconomic characteristics shape their experience and what would entice them back into paid work. Participants' main reasons for being not‐employed included: feeling financially able and ready to exit, feeling unhappy about workplace reorganisations, disability, or their partner's retirement or ill‐health. The reasons given and the degree to which they had planned to exit the workforce affected their willingness and capacity to consider returning. Key determinants of participants' health and wellbeing after stopping paid work were the extent to which they had planned their exit and the status of their health and wealth at the time of their exit. The paper concludes there is some scope for increasing the number of employed older people if policy makers attend to workforce health and wellbeing as crucial to workforce retention policy development.     

Parental communication about emotional contexts: Differences across discrete categories of emotion

Parent socialization of emotion is critical for children's emotional development. One mechanism through which parents socialize emotional understanding is in their conversations about emotions with their children. Previous research has investigated parent–child discourse about emotions differing by positive and negative valence. This study examined how parents communicated about and differentially emphasized elements of discrete emotion contexts (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, joy). Caregivers described images of emotional contexts to their 18‐month‐old or 24‐month‐old infant. Findings indicated that parents talked more about sadness images than joy images. Furthermore, parents mentioned the emoter more in anger and sadness contexts and talked about the referent more in disgust, fear, and joy contexts. Parents also posed more questions to female than male infants, particularly when discussing anger, sadness, and disgust images. No age differences were observed for any measure. These findings provide new insight into how parents talk about and highlight aspects of discrete emotional contexts.     

购房：制度变迁下的住房分层与自我选择性流动

本文基于2010年广州市的千户问卷调查数据,利用内生转换回归模型,发现了住房市场化改革过程中住房分层机制中的自我选择性：在1998年前的体制内,能力强的人倾向于不购房,而在1998年前的体制外和1998年以后,能力强的人倾向于购房。在1998年前的体制内,不购房者如果购房,其住房等级会下降;购房者如果不购房,其住房等级会上升。在1998年前体制外和1998年后,那些人力资本或政治资本高的居民实际购房时,其住房等级会更高;购房者如果不购房,其住房等级会下降。由此可知,权力机制与市场机制是影响住房分层的结构因素,政治资本或人力资本的高低是住房分层的必要条件,而非充分条件。“政治资本或人力资本高的居民住房等级也高”的论断从某种意义上忽视了居民的自我选择过程。     

A Game-Theoretic View of Voting

Two game-theoretic arguments for the potential rationality of voting are presented. The first argument suggests that people make choices that allow the most favorable forecasts. People choose to vote inasmuch as they project their own choices between voting and abstaining more strongly onto members of their own political group than onto members of other political groups. Relevant evidence is reviewed and extended by new findings in a simulated public-goods dilemma. The second argument suggests that people preview how they will feel about each of the four possible scenarios generated by the conjunctions of their own choices (to vote or to abstain) and the election outcome (victory or defeat). They choose to vote inasmuch as they feel their own vote will not be wasted. The implications of both arguments for efforts to increase turnout are discussed.     

Is There a “Pessimistic” Bias in Individual Beliefs? Evidence from a Simple Survey

It is an important issue for economic and finance applications to determine whether individuals exhibit a behavioral bias toward pessimism in their beliefs, in a lottery or more generally in an investment opportunities framework. In this paper, we analyze the answers of a sample of 1,540 individuals to the following question “Imagine that a coin will be flipped 10 times. Each time, if heads, you win $10\texttt{C}\!\!\!\rule[2.3pt]{.4em}{.3pt}\!\!\rule[3.3pt]{.4em}{.3pt}It is an important issue for economic and finance applications to determine whether individuals exhibit a behavioral bias toward pessimism in their beliefs, in a lottery or more generally in an investment opportunities framework. In this paper, we analyze the answers of a sample of 1,540 individuals to the following question “Imagine that a coin will be flipped 10 times. Each time, if heads, you win . How many times do you think that you will win?” The average answer is surprisingly about 3.9 which is below the average 5, and we interpret this as a pessimistic bias. We find that women are more “pessimistic” than men, as are old people relative to young. We also analyze how our notion of pessimism is related to more general notions of pessimism previously introduced in psychology.     

Competence effects for choices involving gains and losses

We investigate how choices for uncertain gain and loss prospects are affected by the decision maker’s perceived level of knowledge about the underlying domain of uncertainty. Specifically, we test whether Heath and Tversky’s (J Risk Uncertain 4:5–28, 1991) competence hypothesis extends from gains to losses. We predict that the commonly-observed preference for high knowledge over low knowledge prospects for gains reverses for losses. We employ an empirical setup in which participants make hypothetical choices between gain or loss prospects in which the outcome depends on whether a high or low knowledge event occurs. We infer decision weighting functions for high and low knowledge events from choices using a representative agent preference model. For gains, we replicate the results of Kilka and Weber (Manage Sci 47:1712–1726, 2001), finding that decision makers are more attracted to choices that they feel more knowledgeable about. However, for losses, we find limited support for our extension of the competence effect.     

Children Who Choose Not to Eat Meat: A Study of Early Moral Decision‐making

Can young children frame their own choices in terms of moral considerations, particularly when those choices do not match the practices of immediate authority figures? To answer this question, we studied 6‐ to 10‐year‐old independent vegetarians—children who have elected to become vegetarians, despite being raised in non‐vegetarian families. In Study 1, these children were asked about their reasons for not eating meat; their replies were compared with those made by vegetarian children from vegetarian families (family vegetarians) and non‐vegetarian children from non‐vegetarian families (non‐vegetarians). Unlike the other two groups, independent vegetarians universally focused on the suffering that meat eating implies for animals but, surprisingly, they did not condemn others for meat eating. Study 2 attempted to explain this tolerance by examining if children focus on whether an individual has made a commitment to not eating meat. All three groups of children condemned meat eating by morally committed vegetarians, but not by those who have made no such commitment. The two studies show that independent vegetarians are committed to not eating meat on moral grounds and judge that it would be wrong to break that commitment. Nevertheless, like non‐vegetarian children, they remain tolerant toward people who have made no such commitment.     

The Endowment Effect,Status Quo Bias and Loss Aversion: Rational Alternative Explanation

The endowment effect, status quo bias, and loss aversion are robust and well documented results from experimental psychology. They introduce a wedge between the prices at which one is willing to sell or buy a good. The objective of this paper is to address this wedge. We show that the presence of asymmetric information in a rational-agent framework can also account for the endowment effect, status quo bias and loss aversion without invoking psychology-based explanations proposed in the past.     

The Sound Of Silence: Listening to What Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking Children Say and Do Not Say

Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are noted at times tobe silent or circumspect about their origins and circumstanceswhen faced with authority figures, including social workers.Using some key ideas from ethnography and narrative therapy,this article examines existing literature on silence in thelives of unaccompanied minors, and on how the choices they makeabout talking and not talking can hinder or facilitate resettlement.It then describes a small research study within which interviewswere undertaken with local authority social workers to elicittheir responses to unaccompanied minors in such circumstances.These revealed that practitioners understood the children’ssilence in varied ways, and that they could be practically helpful,therapeutically minded and reliable companions, accompanyingthe young people towards resettlement, with or without knowingthe detailed ‘truth’ about their past     

Status-quo and omission biases

Bias toward the status quo, found in choice and in emotional reactions to adverse outcomes, has been confounded with bias toward omission. We unconfounded these effects with scenarios in which change occurs unless action is taken. Subjects reacted more strongly to adverse outcomes caused by action, whether the status quo was maintained or not, and subjects preferred inaction over action even when inaction was associated with change. No status-quo bias was found in a matching task, which did not require action. The observed status-quo bias is at least partly caused by a bias toward omissions.     

Action Bias and Environmental Decisions

Individuals have a penchant for action, often for good reasons. But action bias arises if that penchant is carried over to areas where those reasons do not apply, hence is nonrational. Action bias is explored theoretically, and then empirically, using data from surveys of hypothetical environmental decisions. Quite apart from agency considerations, individuals like to affect outcomes when gains are reaped. Given the ability to help one of two sites, we find that decision makers choose to foster improvement rather than prevent deterioration, despite framing that makes it arbitrary which site is improved, which preserved. Strong action bias—individuals choosing to reap gains even though they must impose losses—is also observed. These concepts are related to loss aversion, status quo bias, omission bias for losses, and bright-line behavior.     

Construal Processes in Preference Assessment

Interpreting people's preferences requires understanding how they have construed their tasks, interpreting the proposed alternatives in the context where the evaluation is being made. With stylized experimental or survey choices, researchers' challenge is typically identifying the features that people add in order to make their task real enough to answer (i.e., how they read between the lines). With rich “real world” choices, researchers' challenge is typically identifying the features that people neglect, as they reduce their task to manageable complexity (i.e., which lines they choose to read). In either case, if people misunderstand or mistrust the stated transaction, they may evaluate a different offer than the one that was proposed. Such misconstruals are a nuisance for investigators, insofar as dealing with them delays the measurements that motivated the research. However, they can also provide an opportunity, by focusing attention on how people give meaning to choice situations. This article describes procedures for studying construal processes, strategies for getting people to answer the questions that interest researchers, and options for interpreting responses when people construe questions differently than was intended.