Abstract
We examine the net benefits of social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19 in USA. Social distancing saves lives but imposes large costs on society due to reduced economic activity. We ...use epidemiological and economic forecasting to perform a rapid benefit–cost analysis of controlling the COVID-19 outbreak. Assuming that social distancing measures can substantially reduce contacts among individuals, we find net benefits of about $5.2 trillion in our benchmark case. We examine the magnitude of the critical parameters that might imply negative net benefits, including the value of statistical life and the discount rate. A key unknown factor is the speed of economic recovery with and without social distancing measures in place. A series of robustness checks also highlight the key role of the value of mortality risk reductions and discounting in the analysis and point to a need for effective economic stimulus when the outbreak has passed.
Truth Telling Under Oath Jacquemet, Nicolas; Luchini, Stephane; Rosaz, Julie ...
IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc,
01/2019, Volume:
65, Issue:
1
Journal Article, Paper
Peer reviewed
Open access
Oath taking for senior executives has been promoted as a means to enhance honesty within and toward organizations. Herein we explore whether people who voluntarily sign a solemn truth-telling oath ...are more committed to sincere behavior when offered the chance to lie. We design an experiment to test how the oath affects truth telling in two contexts: a neutral context replicating the typical experiment in the literature, and a “loaded” context in which we remind subjects that “a lie is a lie.” We consider four payoff configurations, with differential monetary incentives to lie, implemented as within-subjects treatment variables. The results are reinforced by robustness investigations in which each subject made only one lying decision. Our results show that the oath reduces lying, especially in the loaded environment—falsehoods are reduced by 50%. The oath, however, has a weaker effect on lying in the neutral environment. The oath did affect decision times in all instances: the average person takes significantly more time deciding whether to lie under oath.
This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Numerous analyses of the benefits and costs of COVID‐19 policies have been completed quickly as the crisis has unfolded. The results often largely depend on the approach used to value mortality risk ...reductions, typically expressed as the value per statistical life (VSL). Many analyses rely on a population‐average VSL estimate; some adjust VSL for life expectancy at the age of death. We explore the implications of theory and empirical studies, which suggest that the relationship between age and VSL is uncertain. We compare the effects of three approaches: (1) an invariant population‐average VSL; (2) a constant value per statistical life‐year (VSLY); and (3) a VSL that follows an inverse‐U pattern, peaking in middle age. We find that when applied to the U.S. age distribution of COVID‐19 deaths, these approaches result in average VSL estimates of $10.63 million, $4.47 million, and $8.31 million. We explore the extent to which applying these estimates alters the conclusions of frequently cited analyses of social distancing, finding that they significantly affect the findings. However, these analyses do not address other characteristics of COVID‐19 deaths that may increase or decrease the VSL estimates. Examples include the health status and income level of those affected, the size of the risk change, and the extent to which the risk is dreaded, uncertain, involuntarily incurred, and outside of one's control. The effects of these characteristics and their correlation with age are uncertain; it is unclear whether they amplify or diminish the effects of age on VSL.
Economists, psychologists, and marketers are interested in determining the monetary value people place on non-market goods for a variety of reasons: to carry out cost-benefit analysis, to determine ...the welfare effects of technological innovation or public policy, to forecast new product success, and to understand individual and consumer behavior. Unfortunately, many currently available techniques for eliciting individuals' values suffer from a serious problem in that they involve asking individuals hypothetical questions about intended behavior. Experimental auctions circumvent this problem because they involve individuals exchanging real money for real goods in an active market. This represents a promising means for eliciting non-market values. Lusk and Shogren provide a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of experimental auctions. It will be a valuable resource to graduate students, practitioners and researchers concerned with the design and utilization of experimental auctions in applied economic and marketing research.
It is well understood that adding to the population increases CO2 emissions. At the same time, having children is a transformative experience, such that it might profoundly change adult (i.e., ...parents') preferences and consumption. How it might change is, however, unknown. Depending on if becoming a parent makes a person "greener" or "browner," parents may either balance or exacerbate the added CO2 emissions from their children. Parents might think more about the future, compared to childless adults, including risks posed to their children from environmental events like climate change. But parenthood also adds needs and more intensive competition on your scarce time. Carbon-intensive goods can add convenience and help save time, e.g., driving may facilitate being in more places in one day, compared to public transportation or biking. Pre-prepared food that contain red meat may save time and satisfy more household preferences, relative to vegetarian food. We provide the first rigorous test of whether parents are greener or browner than other adults. We create a unique dataset by combining detailed micro data on household expenditures of all expenditure groups particularly important for CO2 emissions (transportation, food, and heating/electricity) with CO2 emissions, and compare emissions from Swedish adults with and without children. We find that parents emit more CO2 than childless adults. Only a small fraction of adults permanently choose not to have children, which means any meaningful self-selection into parenthood based on green preferences is unlikely. Our findings suggest that having children might increase CO2 emissions both by adding to the population and by increasing CO2 emissions from those choosing to have children.
This study explores whether an oath to honesty can reduce both shirking and lying among crowd-sourced internet workers. Using a classic coin-flip experiment, we first confirm that a substantial ...majority of Mechanical Turk workers both shirk and lie when reporting the number of heads flipped. We then demonstrate that lying can be reduced by first asking each worker to swear voluntarily on his or her honor to tell the truth in subsequent economic decisions. Even in this online, purely anonymous environment, the oath significantly reduced the percent of subjects telling "big" lies (by roughly 27%), but did not affect shirking. We also explore whether a truth-telling oath can be used as a screening device if implemented after decisions have been made. Conditional on flipping response, MTurk shirkers and workers who lied were significantly less likely to agree to an ex-post honesty oath. Our results suggest oaths may help elicit more truthful behavior, even in online crowd-sourced environments.
Preference elicitation under oath Jacquemet, Nicolas; Joule, Robert-Vincent; Luchini, Stéphane ...
Journal of environmental economics and management,
January 2013, 2013-1-00, 20130101, 2013-01, Volume:
65, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Eliciting sincere preferences for non-market goods remain a challenge due to the discrepency between hypothetical and real behavior and false zeros. The gap arises because people either overstate ...hypothetical values or understate real commitments or a combination of both. Herein we examine whether the traditional real-world institution of the solemn oath can improve preference elicitation. Applying the social psychology theory on the oath as a truth-telling-commitment device, we ask our bidders to swear on their honour to give honest answers prior to participating in an incentive-compatible second-price auction. The oath is an ancillary mechanism to commit bidders to bid sincerely in a second-price auction. Results from our induced valuation testbed treatments suggest that the oath-only auctions outperform all our other auctions (real and hypothetical). In our homegrown valuation treatments eliciting preferences for dolphin protection, the oath-only design induced people to treat as binding both their experimental budget constraint (i.e., lower values on the high end of the value distribution) and participation constraint (i.e., positive values in place of the zero bids used to opt-out of auction). Based on companion treatments, we show the oath works through an increase in the willingness to tell the truth, due to a strengthening of the intrinsic motivation to do so.
The IPBES Global Assessment: Pathways to Action Ruckelshaus, Mary H.; Jackson, Stephen T.; Mooney, Harold A. ...
Trends in ecology & evolution (Amsterdam),
20/May , Volume:
35, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The first Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found widespread, accelerating declines in Earth’s biodiversity and ...associated benefits to people from nature. Addressing these trends will require science-based policy responses to reduce impacts, especially at national to local scales. Effective scaling of science-policy efforts, driven by global and national assessments, is a major challenge for turning assessment into action and will require unprecedented commitment by scientists to engage with communities of policy and practice. Fulfillment of science’s social contract with society, and with nature, will require strong institutional support for scientists’ participation in activities that transcend conventional research and publication.
The IPBES Global Assessment released in the spring of 2019 is a significant milestone for the international scientific community; the critical challenge now is to disseminate and apply its findings at national and local scales where most policy and management decisions affecting biodiversity and ecosystem services are made.Effective, enduring action from assessments requires collaborative, multidisciplinary science-policy processes that frame and cogenerate knowledge with decision makers and stakeholders from many sectors.Examples of assessments driving policy responses to recover biodiversity and ecosystem services highlight the need for significant, long-term commitments by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the private sector, civil society, and the scientific community.
Recent experimental research suggests that unpredicted behavior in the lab may result from endowment distribution and origin. We design an experiment to explore the impact of heterogeneous endowments ...and earned endowments on observed contributions in a linear public good game. Our results suggest that contribution levels were significantly lower when groups had heterogeneous rather than homogeneous endowments, with this finding being independent of the origin of endowment. We did not find, however, that the lack of free-riding in public goods experiments was an artifact of endowment origin. Group members contributed about the same to the public good whether their endowments were earned or not.
Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty? Jacquemet, Nicolas; Luchini, Stéphane; Rosaz, Julie ...
Frontiers in psychology,
08/2021, Volume:
12
Journal Article, Paper
Peer reviewed
Open access
In a competitive business environment, dishonesty can pay. Self-interested executives and managers can have incentive to shade the truth for personal gain. In response, the business community has ...considered how to commit these executives and managers to a higher ethical standard. The MBA Oath and the Dutch Bankers Oath are examples of such a commitment device. The question we test herein is whether the oath can be used as an effective form of ethics management for future executives/managers-who for our experiment we recruited from a leading French business school-by actually improving their honesty. Using a classic Sender-Receiver strategic game experiment, we reinforce professional identity by pre-selecting the group to which Receivers belong. This allows us to determine whether taking the oath deters lying among future managers. Our results suggest "yes and no." We observe that these future executives/managers who took a solemn honesty oath as a Sender were
significantly more likely to tell the truth when the lie was detrimental to the Receiver, but
were not more likely to tell the truth when the lie was mutually beneficial to both the Sender and Receiver. A joint product of our design is our ability to measure in-group bias in lying behavior in our population of subjects (comparing behavior of subjects in the same and different business schools). The experiment provides clear evidence of a lack of such bias.
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