Die Abstufung der Krankenkassenprämien nach Rauchern und Nichtrauchern würde einen Schritt weg von der Einheitsprämie bedeuten. Die Autoren des folgenden Beitrags kommen in ihrer ökonomischen Analyse zum Schluss, dass diese Abstufung die Effizienz der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung verbessern würde
Previous studies in positive psychology have indicated that work satisfaction is an important determinant of individual well-being. Research has suggested that people are most satisfied with their work when they are doing what they are drawn to naturally. We provide further evidence on this issue from a large representative data set, the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The 2005 wave of the SOEP contains a battery of personality questions as well as detailed information on personal life and work life. We extract the Big Five personality factors and one character strength: vitality. The main results are based on regression analysis. The analysis supports the hypothesis that certain personality clusters are more predominant in some occupations than in others. Furthermore, an alignment between personal profile and occupational profile tends to be related positively to satisfaction. These results indicate that ignoring mental aspects of work has its price in terms of well-being. They also highlight the importance of studying the way we structure work and harness personality and individual strengths within positive psychology.
Trust and betrayal of trust are ubiquitous in human societies. Recent behavioral evidence shows that the neuropeptide oxytocin increases trust among humans, thus offering a unique chance of gaining a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying trust and the adaptation to breach of trust. We examined the neural circuitry of trusting behavior by combining the intranasal, double-blind, administration of oxytocin with fMRI. We find that subjects in the oxytocin group show no change in their trusting behavior after they learned that their trust had been breached several times while subjects receiving placebo decrease their trust. This difference in trust adaptation is associated with a specific reduction in activation in the amygdala, the midbrain regions, and the dorsal striatum in subjects receiving oxytocin, suggesting that neural systems mediating fear processing (amygdala and midbrain regions) and behavioral adaptations to feedback information (dorsal striatum) modulate oxytocin’s effect on trust. These findings may help to develop deeper insights into mental disorders such as social phobia and autism, which are characterized by persistent fear or avoidance of social interactions.
Häufig wird die Globalisierung und auch die Welthandelsorganisation WTO für den verstärkten Raubbau an der Umwelt verantwortlich gemacht. Eine wichtige Rolle beim
Schutz der Umwelt spielen die Eigentumsrechte. Wie kann erreicht werden, dass der Eigentümer vom Schutz der Umwelt profitiert, die externen Kosten also internalisiert werden?
The aim of The Elgar Companion to Health Economics is to take an audience of advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers to the frontier of research in health economics, by providing them with short and easily readable introductions to key topics. The volume brings together 50 chapters written by more than 90 leading international contributors. The contributions to the Companion are concise and focus on specific concepts, methods and key evidence.
In permit trading systems, free initial allocation is common practice. A recent example is the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS). We investigate effects of different free allocation schemes on incentives and identify significant perverse effects on abatement and output employing a simple multi-period model. Firms have incentives for strategic action if allocation in one period depends on their actions in previous ones and thus can be influenced by them. These findings play a major role where trading schemes become increasingly popular as environmental or resource use policy instruments. This is of particular relevance in the EU-ETS where the current period is a trial-period before the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol. Finally, this paper fills a gap in the literature by establishing a consistent terminology for initial allocation.
This article uses basic facts from the psychology of attention to show how the limited attention of consumers affects economic competition. The article determines endogenously whether an economy is information rich or information poor. A conventional economic equilibrium results if subjects have spare attention capacity. At the positive level, the respective impacts of advances in information technology, international integration and the media on equilibrium diversity and level of attention-seeking activities are shown. At the normative level, the issues of welfare, efficiency and optimal policy interventions are addressed.
In considering the contribution of cognitive neuropsychology to the understanding of persecutory delusions, we shall proceed in this chapter as follows: First, we shall consider the contribution of the more conventional clinical neuropsychological approach to the study of delusions. After all, cognitive neuropsychology developed as a hybrid of clinical neuropsychology (the psychological study of brain-injured people) and cognitive psychology (the study of the mental information-processing procedures that people use to perform such activities as speaking and understanding speech, and recognizing objects). Second, we shall outline the cognitive neuropsychological approach with brief reference to its history. Third, we shall describe how this approach has been applied to the study of delusions with reference
to our two-deficit cognitive neuropsychological model of monothematic delusions. Finally we shall evaluate the applicability of this model to the explanation of other delusions that are not so obviously neuropsychological; here we shall focus on persecutory delusions.
Autism is associated with an inability to identify and distinguish one’s own feelings. We assessed this inability using alexithymia and empathy questionnaires, and used fMRI to investigate brain activity while introspecting on emotion. Individuals with high functioning autism/Asperger
syndrome (HFA/AS) were compared with matched controls. Participants rated stimuli from the International Affective Picture System twice, once according to the degree of un/pleasantness that the pictures induced, and once according to their color balance. The groups differed significantly on both alexithymia and empathy questionnaires. Alexithymia and lack of empathy were correlated, indicating a link between understanding one’s own and others’ emotions. For both groups a strong
relationship between questionnaire scores and brain activity was found in the anterior insula (AI), when participants were required to assess their feelings to unpleasant pictures. Regardless of selfreported degree of emotional awareness, individuals with HFA/AS differed from controls when required to introspect on their feelings by showing reduced activation in self-reflection/mentalizing
regions. Thus, we conclude that difficulties in emotional awareness are related to hypoactivity in AI in both individuals with HFA/AS and controls, and that the particular difficulties in emotional awareness in individuals with HFA/AS are not related to their impairments in selfreflection/mentalizing.
In a laboratory experiment we show that minimum wages have significant and lasting effects on subjects’ reservation wages. The temporary introduction of a minimum wage leads to
a rise in subjects’ reservation wages which persists even after the minimum wage has been removed. Firms are therefore forced to pay higher wages after the removal of the minimum wage than before its introduction. As a consequence, the employment effects of removing the
minimum wage are significantly smaller than are the effects of its introduction. The impact of minimum wages on reservation wages may also explain the anomalously low utilization of subminimum wages if employers are given the opportunity of paying less than a minimum wage previously introduced. It may further explain why employers often increase workers' wages after an increase in the minimum wage by an amount exceeding that necessary for compliance with the higher minimum. At a more general level, our results suggest that economic policy may affect people’s behavior by shaping the perception of what is a fair transaction and by creating entitlement effects.
