Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism. An economic analysis of terrorism also points to alternative and potentially superior policies. We suggest three policies that can well be integrated into existing constitutions of democratic and rule-based countries. Two policies are based on diminishing the benefits of committing terrorist acts for prospective terrorists. This can be done by decentralising various parts of society or by diverting attention from terrorists, once a terrorist act has been committed. A third policy is to raise the
relative costs of terrorism by lowering the costs of non-violent means for pursuing political goals.
People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals’ utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we find that people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well-being. Additional empirical analyses do not find institutional explanations of the empirical results that commuters systematically incur losses. We discuss several possibilities of an extended model of human behavior able to explain this ‘commuting paradox’.
The existence of social learning has been confirmed in diverse taxa, from apes to guppies. In order to advance our understanding of the consequences of social transmission and evolution of behavior, however, we require statistical tools that can distinguish among diverse social learning strategies. In this paper, we advance two main ideas. First, social learning is diverse, in the sense that individuals can take advantage of different kinds of information and combine them in different ways. Examining learning strategies for different information conditions illuminates the more detailed design of social learning. We construct and analyze an evolutionary model of diverse social learning heuristics, in order to generate predictions and illustrate the impact of design differences on an organism's fitness. Second, in order to eventually escape the laboratory and apply social learning models to natural behavior, we require statistical methods that do not depend upon tight experimental control. Therefore we examine strategic social learning in an experimental setting in which the social information itself is endogenous to the experimental group, as it is in natural settings. We develop statistical models for distinguishing among different strategic uses of social information. The experimental data strongly suggest most participants employ a hierarchical strategy that uses both average observed
payoffs of options as well as frequency information, the same model predicted by our evolutionary analysis to dominate a wide range of conditions.
I discuss how poverty decomposition methods relate to integral approximation, which is the foundation of decomposition of the temporal change of a quantity into key drivers. This offers a common framework for the different decomposition methods used in the literature, claries their often somewhat unclear theoretical underpinning and
identifes the methods'shortcomings. In light of integral approximation, many methods actually lack a sound theoretical basis and they usually have an ad-hoc character in assigning the residual terms to the different key
effects. I illustrate these claims for the Shapley-value decomposition and methods related to the Datt-Ravallion
approach and point out difficulties in axiomatic approaches to poverty decomposition. Recent developments in energy and pollutant decomposition offer some promising methods, but ultimately, further development of poverty decomposition should account for the basis in integral approximation.
Neun Jahre Wettbewerb unter den Krankenversicherungen brachten nicht die erhofften kostendämpfenden Effekte. Schuld daran ist, wie der Autor des folgenden Beitrags darlegt,
eine verfehlte Wettbewerbsregulierung, die dem sogenannten Risikoausgleich zwischen den Krankenversicherern zu wenig Beachtung schenkt.
Die vom Bundesrat angestrebte Senkung der Pflichtreserven der Krankenversicherer nimmt ein grösseres Risiko für einen allfälligen Konkurs in Kauf als bisher. Ein statistisch gesehen zu grosses Risiko, wie der Autor des folgenden Beitrags meint, der darlegt, dass damit künftig
mit zwei Konkursen pro Jahr gerechnet werden müsste.
Selbst vom DEZA lassen sich Aussagen vernehmen wie «Unser heutiger Lebensstil basiert darauf, dass er anderen verwehrt bleibt». Lapidar. Und von grosser Sprengkraft. Effizienz versucht, sich dieser Problematik anzunehmen, aber nur weiterführende Konzepte wie Suffizienz können Lösungen bieten.
Die internationale Verflechtung der Finanzmärkte hat stark zugenommen. Viele kritisieren, dies habe die gegenwärtige Kreditkrise verschärft, wenn nicht gar ausgelöst, und fordern schärfere Regulierungen. Der Autor wendet sich gegen diese Kritik. Die Verteilung von Kreditrisiken über die Welt hinweg bringe Wohlfahrtsgewinne. Zudem würden globalisierte Finanzmärkte mithelfen, die Folgen der Krise zu dämpfen.
