The paper analyses the role of martyrdom superstition in fostering rebellious collective action. Rebellions are plagued with problems of free riding, as the benefits of this activity are small, while the costs are high. I argue, however, that a religious society may rationally use the martyrdom superstition to incentivize rebellion. Martyrs gain utility from suffering, which lowers their private costs in case a rebellion does not succeed. If the spiritual benefits from martyrdom are sufficiently high and the costs of failed rebellion are not infinite, then the expected value of rebelling will be higher than the expected value of non-participation. I apply these insights to a radical splinter of the Canadian Doukhobor sect called the Sons of Freedom. Through martyrdom, the anarchic group rebelled against the Canadian government for nearly 80 years, despite their small numbers and low odds of success.
{"title":"Martyrdom and Rebellious Collective Action","authors":"V. Maltsev","doi":"10.1561/105.00000134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/105.00000134","url":null,"abstract":"The paper analyses the role of martyrdom superstition in fostering rebellious collective action. Rebellions are plagued with problems of free riding, as the benefits of this activity are small, while the costs are high. I argue, however, that a religious society may rationally use the martyrdom superstition to incentivize rebellion. Martyrs gain utility from suffering, which lowers their private costs in case a rebellion does not succeed. If the spiritual benefits from martyrdom are sufficiently high and the costs of failed rebellion are not infinite, then the expected value of rebelling will be higher than the expected value of non-participation. I apply these insights to a radical splinter of the Canadian Doukhobor sect called the Sons of Freedom. Through martyrdom, the anarchic group rebelled against the Canadian government for nearly 80 years, despite their small numbers and low odds of success.","PeriodicalId":43339,"journal":{"name":"Review of Behavioral Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46762963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cash, Funeral Benefits or Nothing at All: How to Incentivize Family Consent for Organ Donation
现金、葬礼福利或什么都没有：如何激励家人同意器官捐赠
{"title":"Cash, Funeral Benefits or Nothing at All: How to Incentivize Family Consent for Organ Donation","authors":"Vinh Pham","doi":"10.1561/105.00000136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/105.00000136","url":null,"abstract":"Cash, Funeral Benefits or Nothing at All: How to Incentivize Family Consent for Organ Donation","PeriodicalId":43339,"journal":{"name":"Review of Behavioral Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44711109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper investigates the effects of social distance and national bias on social preferences in China. In a field experiment featuring a diverse subject pool, we implement an incentivised dictator game, in which we vary the way decision-makers are primed to think about their social distance from the potential recipients of their generosity, as well as the nationality of these recipients. We find that decision-makers become substantially less pro-social when primed social distance increases. However, national bias is not found – there is no evidence subjects are willing to give more money to Chinese strangers than to unknown foreigners. The effects of social distance emerge more strongly at closer levels of distance for those who are rural, low-educated and poor, while they appear more strongly at greater levels of distance for their urban, high-educated and rich counterparts.
{"title":"Social Preferences in a Chinese Cultural Context","authors":"Saileshsingh Gunessee, Tom Lane, Shangjue Xie","doi":"10.1561/105.00000135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/105.00000135","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the effects of social distance and national bias on social preferences in China. In a field experiment featuring a diverse subject pool, we implement an incentivised dictator game, in which we vary the way decision-makers are primed to think about their social distance from the potential recipients of their generosity, as well as the nationality of these recipients. We find that decision-makers become substantially less pro-social when primed social distance increases. However, national bias is not found – there is no evidence subjects are willing to give more money to Chinese strangers than to unknown foreigners. The effects of social distance emerge more strongly at closer levels of distance for those who are rural, low-educated and poor, while they appear more strongly at greater levels of distance for their urban, high-educated and rich counterparts.","PeriodicalId":43339,"journal":{"name":"Review of Behavioral Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46360796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rizzo and Whitman have mounted a comprehensive attack on a key theoretical underpinning of “nudging”: that we are or ought to be rational choice agents. However, I doubt their argument will persuade politicians to stop “nudging.” For the politician who cares little about whether their interventions might be paternalist, some-thing more is needed. This is the “problem” that needs addressing. On this, R&W largely buttress their anti-“nudging” position by presenting a slippery slope argument for being predisposed against any advance in Leviathan – “nudging” included. I suggest this argument does not work – at least if, as appears to be the case, J. S. Mill is its authority. I offer instead a “solution” that turns on an argument that politics is about the selection of rules and not outcomes for specific individuals. “Nudging” does precisely the latter. Indeed “nudging” cannot be about a change in the rules because, as the proponents of “nudging” have made clear, “nudging” should not affect the decisions of rational choice agents. Therefore, if politics is about rule selection, “nudging” does not belong in politics.
{"title":"The “Problem” Is Different and So Is the “Solution”","authors":"Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap","doi":"10.1561/105.00000145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/105.00000145","url":null,"abstract":"Rizzo and Whitman have mounted a comprehensive attack on a key theoretical underpinning of “nudging”: that we are or ought to be rational choice agents. However, I doubt their argument will persuade politicians to stop “nudging.” For the politician who cares little about whether their interventions might be paternalist, some-thing more is needed. This is the “problem” that needs addressing. On this, R&W largely buttress their anti-“nudging” position by presenting a slippery slope argument for being predisposed against any advance in Leviathan – “nudging” included. I suggest this argument does not work – at least if, as appears to be the case, J. S. Mill is its authority. I offer instead a “solution” that turns on an argument that politics is about the selection of rules and not outcomes for specific individuals. “Nudging” does precisely the latter. Indeed “nudging” cannot be about a change in the rules because, as the proponents of “nudging” have made clear, “nudging” should not affect the decisions of rational choice agents. Therefore, if politics is about rule selection, “nudging” does not belong in politics.","PeriodicalId":43339,"journal":{"name":"Review of Behavioral Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67075838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The approach to human behavior and choice by Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman in Escaping Paternalism: Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy , has much in common with that of John Stuart Mill and Philip Wicksteed and departs from the “standard” neoclassical account developed by William Stanley Jevons. I connect the Rizzo-Whitman case for limited paternalism to Mill’s methodological approach and the no harm principle. Mill’s methodology and his emphasis on how people learn via making choices, are consistent with the Rizzo-Whitman approach. Mill’s no harm principle further bolsters their case. In marked contrast with Mill, and like the prescriptive paternalists with whom RW take issue (p. 280), Jevons was confident that he knew how his subjects should act; if they failed to fulfill his conditions for equilibrium spending, he was ready and willing to recommend policies to correct the so-called improvidence and immorality of the laboring classes.
{"title":"On Making and Remaking Ourselves and Others: Mill to Jevons and Beyond on Rationality, Learning, and Paternalism","authors":"S. Peart","doi":"10.1561/105.00000140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/105.00000140","url":null,"abstract":"The approach to human behavior and choice by Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman in Escaping Paternalism: Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy , has much in common with that of John Stuart Mill and Philip Wicksteed and departs from the “standard” neoclassical account developed by William Stanley Jevons. I connect the Rizzo-Whitman case for limited paternalism to Mill’s methodological approach and the no harm principle. Mill’s methodology and his emphasis on how people learn via making choices, are consistent with the Rizzo-Whitman approach. Mill’s no harm principle further bolsters their case. In marked contrast with Mill, and like the prescriptive paternalists with whom RW take issue (p. 280), Jevons was confident that he knew how his subjects should act; if they failed to fulfill his conditions for equilibrium spending, he was ready and willing to recommend policies to correct the so-called improvidence and immorality of the laboring classes.","PeriodicalId":43339,"journal":{"name":"Review of Behavioral Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67075786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Escaping Paternalism: Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy Rizzo and Whitman challenge behavioral economics and paternalism on multiple levels, from conceptual underpinnings and the meaning of rationality to more applied implications and policy recommendations. This paper delves deeper into Rizzo and Whitman’s conception of inclusive rationality and places it within a larger historical tradition of purposeful behavior, internal conflict, and endogenous preference formation and change. I make a case to more carefully study two human characteristics – struggle and aspiration, to further the research program of inclusive rationality and behavioral economics. I argue that to extend this research program economists must: (1) have an idiom for struggle that does not deem a behavior rational or irrational either by assumption or by the normative standard set by an external expert; (2) take the process of endogenous preference formation and change more seriously; (3) have a language to model and explain aspiration or becoming; and (4) think about edge cases like relapsing addiction.
{"title":"Inclusive Rationality: Struggle and Aspiration","authors":"S. Rajagopalan","doi":"10.1561/105.00000142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/105.00000142","url":null,"abstract":"In Escaping Paternalism: Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy Rizzo and Whitman challenge behavioral economics and paternalism on multiple levels, from conceptual underpinnings and the meaning of rationality to more applied implications and policy recommendations. This paper delves deeper into Rizzo and Whitman’s conception of inclusive rationality and places it within a larger historical tradition of purposeful behavior, internal conflict, and endogenous preference formation and change. I make a case to more carefully study two human characteristics – struggle and aspiration, to further the research program of inclusive rationality and behavioral economics. I argue that to extend this research program economists must: (1) have an idiom for struggle that does not deem a behavior rational or irrational either by assumption or by the normative standard set by an external expert; (2) take the process of endogenous preference formation and change more seriously; (3) have a language to model and explain aspiration or becoming; and (4) think about edge cases like relapsing addiction.","PeriodicalId":43339,"journal":{"name":"Review of Behavioral Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67075826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
: Are behavioral interventions consonant with a free society? Rizzo and Whitman argue that behavioral interventions aimed at addressing self-harms are premised on an unrealistic neoclassical account of rationality. We show that the rejection of neoclassical assumptions is warranted but does not exhaust the case for what we call “soft interventionism.” Following Hayek’s emergent account of human action and defense of a defined role for legislation to address social challenges in commercial spontaneous orders, we argue that soft interventionism is a less intrusive form of state intervention to tackle the blurred boundaries between externalities and internalities. Nudges can be justified so long as the interventions are proportionate, based on subsidiarity and scientifically informed.
{"title":"Soft Interventionism: A Hayekian Alternative to Libertarian Paternalism","authors":"Nick Cowen, Aris Trantidis","doi":"10.1561/105.00000146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/105.00000146","url":null,"abstract":": Are behavioral interventions consonant with a free society? Rizzo and Whitman argue that behavioral interventions aimed at addressing self-harms are premised on an unrealistic neoclassical account of rationality. We show that the rejection of neoclassical assumptions is warranted but does not exhaust the case for what we call “soft interventionism.” Following Hayek’s emergent account of human action and defense of a defined role for legislation to address social challenges in commercial spontaneous orders, we argue that soft interventionism is a less intrusive form of state intervention to tackle the blurred boundaries between externalities and internalities. Nudges can be justified so long as the interventions are proportionate, based on subsidiarity and scientifically informed.","PeriodicalId":43339,"journal":{"name":"Review of Behavioral Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67075845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The symposium articles fall roughly into three groups: those that connect our work to that of other thinkers and research programs; those that raise concerns about our analytical approach; and those try to delineate principles to guide behavioral policymaking. We will consider these three groups in turn. We wish to thank all the participants to the symposium for their contributions. In particular, we thank Nick Cowen and Malte Dold for taking the initiative to organize the symposium and to edit the papers. We appreciate the complimentary responses to Escaping Paternalism (hereafter EP), of course, but perhaps the critical responses even more. This is the level of engagement we hoped for when writing the book. Some of the articles in the symposium would warrant a dedicated point-by-point reply, but here we will have to be more brief. The symposium articles fall roughly into three groups: those that connect our work to that of other thinkers and research programs; those that raise concerns about our analytical approach; and those try to delineate principles to guide behavioral policymaking. We will consider these three groups in turn.
{"title":"Inclusive Rationality and Paternalism: Responses to Comments and Criticism","authors":"G. Whitman, M. Rizzo","doi":"10.1561/105.00000148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/105.00000148","url":null,"abstract":"The symposium articles fall roughly into three groups: those that connect our work to that of other thinkers and research programs; those that raise concerns about our analytical approach; and those try to delineate principles to guide behavioral policymaking. We will consider these three groups in turn. We wish to thank all the participants to the symposium for their contributions. In particular, we thank Nick Cowen and Malte Dold for taking the initiative to organize the symposium and to edit the papers. We appreciate the complimentary responses to Escaping Paternalism (hereafter EP), of course, but perhaps the critical responses even more. This is the level of engagement we hoped for when writing the book. Some of the articles in the symposium would warrant a dedicated point-by-point reply, but here we will have to be more brief. The symposium articles fall roughly into three groups: those that connect our work to that of other thinkers and research programs; those that raise concerns about our analytical approach; and those try to delineate principles to guide behavioral policymaking. We will consider these three groups in turn.","PeriodicalId":43339,"journal":{"name":"Review of Behavioral Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67075910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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