Reward-related dopaminergic influences on learning and overt behaviour are well established, but any influence on sensory decision-making is largely unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants judged electric somatosensory stimuli on one hand or other, before being rewarded for correct performance at trial end via a visual signal, at one of four anticipated financial levels. Prior to the procedure, participants received either placebo (saline), a dopamine agonist (levodopa), or an antagonist (haloperidol). Principal findings: higher anticipated reward improved tactile decisions. Visually signalled reward reactivated primary somatosensory cortex for the judged hand, more strongly for higher reward. After receiving a higher reward on one trial, somatosensory activations and decisions were enhanced on the next trial. These behavioural and neural effects were all enhanced by levodopa and attenuated by haloperidol, indicating dopaminergic dependency. Dopaminergic reward-related influences extend even to early somatosensory cortex and sensory decision-making.
Die ökonomische Analyse des Glücks anerkennt, dass wirtschaftliche Aktivität kein Selbstzweck ist, sondern nur insoweit von Wert, als sie zur Wohlfahrt des Menschen beiträgt. Dabei wird die individuelle Wohlfahrt näherungsweise über Befragungen zum subjektiven Wohlbefinden gemessen. Darauf aufbauend lässt sich empirisch untersuchen, inwiefern wirtschaftliche Bedingungen und institutionelle Faktoren das individuelle Wohlbefinden beeinflussen. Die Arbeit skizziert die Grundzüge des neuen Ansatzes und präsentiert zwei Anwendungen. Die erste nimmt die Grundidee eines relativen Nutzenkonzepts auf und illustriert sie anhand des Verhältnisses zwischen Einkommen und Glück. Die zweite stellt den Lebenszufriedenheitsansatz als ein neues Instrument vor, um die individuelle Wohlfahrt im Kontext der Kosten-Nutzen-Analyse zu untersuchen. Abschliessend wird der Frage nach einer das Glück maximierenden Politik nachgegangen.
Economists traditionally focus on monetary compensation when examining incentives, but awards are of immense practical relevance as can be inferred from their prevalence in the form of state orders, decorations and prizes, according to Bruno Frey and Susanne Neckermann.
The paper investigates the relationship between pro-social norms and its implications for improved environmental outcomes. This is an area, which has been neglected in the environmental economics literature. We provide empirical evidence to demonstrate a robust link between perceived environmental cooperation (reduced public littering) and
increased voluntary environmental morale. For this purpose we use European Values Survey (EVS) data for 30 European countries. We also demonstrate that Western European countries are more sensitive to perceived environmental cooperation than the public in Eastern Europe. Interestingly, the results also demonstrate that environmental morale is strongly correlated with several socio-economic and environmental variables. Several robustness tests are conducted to check the validity of
the results.
Scholars today are under increasing pressure to publish in A journals, the main role of which consists in certifying that a paper meets traditional academic standards. Consequences of this pressure are multiple authorship, the slicing of ideas, and incentives to deviate from the truth. The overburdened reviewers' evaluations are characterized by selfish efforts to protect their intel-lectual capital and to avoid risk. The behaviour of editors depends much on whether there are a large or small number of editors. The editors of Kyklos respond to these developments by welcoming innovative papers that go beyond standardized orthodoxy.
This paper presents a new incentive compatible method for measuring confidence in own know-ledge. This method consists of two parts. First, an individual answers several general knowledge questions. Second, the individual chooses among three alternatives: (1) one question is selected at random and the individual receives a payoff if he or she has answered this question correctly; (2) the individual receives the same payoff with a probability equal to the percentage of correctly answered questions; (3) either the first or the second alternative is selected. The choice of the first (second) alternative reveals overconfidence (underconfidence). The individual is well calibra-ted if he or she chooses the third alternative. Experimental results show that subjects, on avera-ge, exhibit underconfidence about their own knowledge when the incentive compatible mecha-nism is used. Their confidence in own knowledge does not depend on their attitude towards risk/ambiguity.
This article reviews the economic literature on the economic and social costs of terrorism with a special emphasis on the consequences on the tourism industry. Several studies find a negative and economically important effect of terrorism on tourism demand. The studies also highlight dif-ferences in the consequences of different types of terror attacks, causality, the temporal patterns of the impact as well as interdependencies between different countries’ tourism industries and their terrorist campaigns. Further, the paper briefly discusses studies on the consequences on foreign direct investment, consumption, savings and investment, international trade, overall eco-nomic development and on subjective life satisfaction.
We use the 1993 wave of the AHEAD data set to estimate a game-theoretic model of families' decisions concerning the provision of informal and formal care for elderly individuals. The outcome is a Nash equilibrium where each family member jointly determines her consumption, transfers for formal care, and allocation of time to informal care, market work, and leisure. We use the estimates to decompose the effects of adult children's opportunity costs, quality of care, and caregiving burden on their propensities to provide informal care. We also simulate the effects of a broad range of policies of current interest.
In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic interactions has proven to be elusive. It is still not clear whether trust is just an epiphenomenon of good institutions or whether it plays an independent causal role capable of shaping important aggregate economic outcomes. In this paper, I rely on a behavioral definition of trust that enables us to relate it to economic primitives such as preferences and beliefs. I review strong biological and behavioral evidence indicating that trusting is not just a special case of risk-taking, but based on important forms of social preferences such as betrayal aversion. Behaviorally defined trust also opens the door for understanding national and ethnic trust differences in terms of differences in preferences and beliefs, and it suggests ways to examine and interpret a causal role of trust.
The paper re-examines Sweden’s price level targeting during the 1930s which is regarded as a precursor of today’s inflation targeting. According to conventional wisdom, the Riksbank was the first central bank to adopt price level targeting, although in practice giving priority to exchange rate stabilisation. Based on Bayesian econometric techniques and the evaluation of new archival sources, we come to the conclusion that defending a fixed exchange rate is hard to reconcile with the claim of adopting price level targeting. This finding has implications for the prevailing view of the 1930s as a decade of great policy innovations.
