Replication-an important, uncommon, and misunderstood practice-is gaining appreciation in psychology. Achieving replicability is important for making research progress. If findings are not ...replicable, then prediction and theory development are stifled. If findings are replicable, then interrogation of their meaning and validity can advance knowledge. Assessing replicability can be productive for generating and testing hypotheses by actively confronting current understandings to identify weaknesses and spur innovation. For psychology, the 2010s might be characterized as a decade of active confrontation. Systematic and multi-site replication projects assessed current understandings and observed surprising failures to replicate many published findings. Replication efforts highlighted sociocultural challenges such as disincentives to conduct replications and a tendency to frame replication as a personal attack rather than a healthy scientific practice, and they raised awareness that replication contributes to self-correction. Nevertheless, innovation in doing and understanding replication and its cousins, reproducibility and robustness, has positioned psychology to improve research practices and accelerate progress.
Incentives or Disincentives? Alexander, Dan
The Journal of politics,
01/2024, Letnik:
86, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
If policy makers wish to encourage members of a population to take a socially beneficial action, should they reward those who take the desired behavior or punish those who do not? This article ...develops a model that facilitates both utilitarian and majoritarian perspectives on the use of incentives and disincentives in public policy. An asymmetry arises between the two types of policy: as incentives grow, higher shares of the population take the beneficial action and earn the reward, driving administrative costs up; as disincentives grow, however, smaller shares of the population fail to take the desired action, requiring fewer fines and exerting downward pressure on administrative costs. Domains that favor inducing high (low) shares of the population to take a desired behavior thus indirectly favor the use of disincentives (incentives). Distributive implications amplify this tendency, such that majoritarian influence on policy making tends to generate stronger disincentives and weaker incentives than are efficient.
•Financial capital plays a key role in economic activities around the world, as well as in efforts to avoid climate change.•We develop a methodology that link financial actors to industries modifying ...tipping elements in Earth’s climate system.•We identify “Financial Giants” who through their ownership have considerable influence over climate stability.•We assess the incentives of “Financial Giants” to collaborate and use their influence to help stabilize tipping elements.
Financial actors and capital play a key role in extractive economic activities around the world, as well as in current efforts to avoid dangerous climate change. Here, in contrast to standard approaches in finance, sustainability and climate change, we elaborate in what ways financial actors affect key biomes around the world, and through this known “tipping elements” in the Earth system. We combine Earth system and sustainability sciences with corporate finance to develop a methodology that allows us to link financial actors to economic activities modifying biomes of key importance for stabilizing Earth’s climate system. Our analysis of key owners of companies operating in the Amazon rainforest (Brazil) and boreal forests (Russia and Canada) identifies a small set of international financial actors with considerable, but as of yet unrealized, globally spanning influence. We denote these “Financial Giants”, and elaborate how incentives and disincentives currently influence their potential to bolster or undermine the stability of the Earth’s climate system.
The past several years have been a time for soul searching in psychology, as we have gradually come to grips with the reality that some of our cherished findings are less robust than we had assumed. ...Nevertheless, the replication crisis highlights the operation of psychological science at its best, as it reflects our growing humility. At the same time, institutional variables, especially the growing emphasis on external funding as an expectation or de facto requirement for faculty tenure and promotion, pose largely unappreciated hazards for psychological science, including (a) incentives for engaging in questionable research practices, (b) a single-minded focus on programmatic research, (c) intellectual hyperspecialization, (d) disincentives for conducting direct replications, (e) stifling of creativity and intellectual risk taking, (f) researchers promising more than they can deliver, and (g) diminished time for thinking deeply. Preregistration should assist with (a), but will do little about (b) through (g). Psychology is beginning to right the ship, but it will need to confront the increasingly deleterious impact of the grant culture on scientific inquiry.
What incentives and disincentives do Internet users weigh as they consider providing information to institutional actors such as government agencies and corporations online? Focus group participants ...list several benefits to sharing information including convenience, access to information, personalization, financial incentives, and more accurate health information, but also recognize that not all sharing may be in their interest. Disincentives to sharing include skepticism, distrust, and fears of discrimination. Decisions about sharing are related to the information type, the context in which information is revealed, and the institution to which they are - or think they are - providing information. Significantly, many participants were mistrustful of both governmental and corporate actors. Participants displayed awareness of privacy risks, but frequently mischaracterized the extent to which information could be aggregated and mined. They displayed resignation towards privacy violations, suggesting that they perceived little control over their ability to protect their privacy, which may influence their privacy behaviors. This calls into question the privacy calculus, as individuals misunderstand the risks of their information provision and do not believe opting out of information-sharing is possible.
Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled entrepreneurs to interact with consumers even before product launches. However, this market persistently suffers from a high failure rate; that is, entrepreneurs ...fail to launch and deliver their products as promised. We investigate the extent to which this high failure rate is because of information distortion—entrepreneurs have uncertainty about consumers’ evaluation of the new products. We model the product launch decisions of different types of entrepreneurs who raise funds through preselling on reward-based crowdfunding platforms and subsequently decide whether to continue with the product launch. To do so, we collect structured and unstructured data from Kickstarter’s digital video game category and classify attributes using supervised learning methods. We develop and estimate an integrated model of crowdfunding demand and entrepreneurs’ product launch decisions. We find that the information entrepreneurs gather from crowdfunding sales has sizable impacts on the product launch decisions of entrepreneurs with low managerial capital or new to the crowdfunding platform. Our counterfactual simulations suggest that platform policy regulating overfunded projects can reduce the product launch failure rate by about 13%.
This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.
Studies of policy tools have not devoted a great deal of attention to the behavioural characteristics of the objects of policy interventions. These 'policy targets' are often assumed to act as simple ...rational utility maximisers who can be manipulated by incentives and disincentives. This has led to a focus on the calibrations of policy tools rather than on whether the mix of tools in use matches the nature of compliance and cooperation required or demanded of a policy situation. This paper proposes a new research and practice agenda focused on better understanding and matching tool resources to target behaviour.
I will argue that alternative currencies discourage passive investment, and therefore serve as a powerful alternative to market‐based capitalism. Throughout this essay, I refer to ‘traditional ...currencies’ as strong currencies and alternative currencies as ‘weak currencies’. Strong currencies allow for, and frequently incorporate incentives for investors, speculators, financiers and others to hoard or leverage money for economic gain, whereas weak currencies are those with no inherent incentive in accumulating the currency, and in fact, may have built‐in disincentives to do so. Before describing each of the three forms of alternative currencies of interest in this essay (local paper currency, timebanking and cryptocurrency) it is worth briefly reviewing current thinking about alternative currencies.
When women in Congress solve a high-profile problem, their colleagues and the media praise their ability to get Washington’s business done by collaborating and compromising in a way that men do not. ...The problem with this popularly held view is that it is entirely anecdotal. In assembling several new data sets to test this proposition systematically, we find that women are more likely than men to participate in the kinds of activities that foster collegiality. But we uncover almost no evidence that women’s legislative behavior on fact finding abroad, cosponsoring legislation, or engaging the legislative process differs from men’s. The partisan divide that now characterizes the legislative process creates strong disincentives for women (and men) to engage in bipartisan problem solving. To be sure, women’s presence in Congress promotes democratic legitimacy, but it does little to reduce gridlock and stalemate on Capitol Hill.
SUMMARY
We investigate the joint role of auditors' and auditees' incentives and disincentives in the decision to waive detected economically important misstatements (EIM) using a proprietary dataset ...with longitudinal information from 850 audit engagements completed over the period 2005 to 2015 in The Netherlands. The empirical results show that auditors are more likely to waive EIM as their economic incentives (e.g., abnormally high audit fees, provision of non-audit services) increase. Auditors are also more likely to waive EIM as the auditee's incentives increase but less likely to waive as the auditee emplaces disincentives in the form of independent governance structures. Further, we find that the presence of an independent supervisory board dampened the effect of non-audit services on waiving EIM. Taken together, the results show that auditors' and auditees' incentives affect waiving decisions, which can potentially compromise both financial reporting reliability and audit quality.
JEL Classifications: M40; M41; M42; M48.
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