infonet-economy

We develop a theory of "risky utilities", i.e., private firms that manage an infrastructure for public service and that may be tempted to engage in excessively risky activities, such as reducing maintenance expenditures (at the risk of provoking a breakdown of the system) or in speculation (at the risk of incurring massive losses it cannot bear). These risky utilities...

Extensive cleaning or checking of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are often interpreted as strategies to avoid harm and as an expression of the widespread belief that OCD patients are more risk-averse. However, despite its clinical significance, the neural basis of risk attitude in OCD is unknown. Here, we investigated neural activity during risk processing using...

The most common test for overconfidence in the form of miscalibration—the Interval Production task (IP)—is based on the assumption that people internalize requested confidence levels. We demonstrate experimentally that decision makers’ perceived confidence is, however, unaffected by variations in the requested confidence level. In addition, we find large heterogeneity in perceived...

BACKGROUND: Negative symptoms of schizophrenia can be grouped in 2 dimensions: apathy and diminished expression. Increasing evidence suggests that negative symptoms are associated with altered neural activity of subcortical and cortical regions in the brain reward system. However, the neurobiological basis of the distinct symptom dimensions within negative symptoms is still poorly...

Successful avoidance of aversive outcomes is crucial for the survival of animals. Although accumulating evidence indicates that an indirect pathway in the basal ganglia is involved in aversive behavior, the ventral pallidum (VP), which is an important component of this pathway, has so far been implicated primarily in appetitive behavior. In this study, we used single-cell recordings...

We introduce a real options model in order to quantify the moral hazard impact of credit default swap (CDS) positions on the corporate default probabilities. Moral hazard is widely addressed in the insurance literature, where the insured agent may become less cautious about preventing the risk from occurring. Importantly, with CDS the moral hazard problem may be magnified since one...

Different social contexts have been used when measuring distributional preferences. This could be problematic as contextual variance may inadvertently muddle the measurement process. We use a within-subjects design and measure distributional preferences in resource allocation tasks with role certainty, role uncertainty, decomposed games, and matrix games. Results show that, at the...

Conceptual priming has become an increasingly popular tool in economics. Here, we review the literature that uses priming in incentivized experiments to study economic questions. We mainly focus on the role of social identity, culture, and norms in shaping preferences and behavior. We also discuss recently raised objections to priming research and conclude with promising avenues for...