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Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the most popular crowdsourcing platforms for online research. Although the recent MTurk data quality crisis has raised serious concerns regarding its utility, this issue can be mitigated by including quality control methods. To date, only a few studies have compared the effectiveness of the methods in preserving an experimental effect. To provide empirical guidance on which quality control methods to use for MTurk research, this study compared different methods on their effectiveness in preserving the magnitude effect in delay discounting, a robust finding in the behavioral economics literature. Two groups of MTurkers, whose HIT approval rate (%) was between 95 and 98 and 99 and 100, were recruited in October 2021. They completed a delay discounting task evaluating the magnitude effect and questions from different quality control methods. The results showed that the group with higher HIT approval rates (i.e., 99%–100%) showed a greater magnitude effect and were more likely to pass the quality control methods than those with lower rates. In addition, the majority of the quality control methods were able to preserve the magnitude effect at the expense of sample sizes. The best combinations of quality control methods that optimally maintained the effect were explored with a discussion of their implications. Although improving data quality is imperative, caution should be exercised as the quality control methods may potentially bias the sample in an undesirable manner (e.g., excluding individuals who show steep delay discounting). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on socio-psychology and economics literature contributions, this paper provides an original conceptual framework examining whether and how natural disasters exert any influence on nuptiality. Scholars suggest that disasters remind people about the transience of life and mortality. This feature triggers shifting towards intrinsic meaningful goals — such as commitment to relationships; at the same time, it fosters people's proximity and support-seeking from their security providing attachment figures and leads to accelerate life transition choices. In this view, disasters are expected to positively impact on people's intentions to marry. Such an effect is evident in case of natural hazards determining slight damage to physical capital (buildings, productive locations, etc.) which have limited economic consequences that do not hamper marriage intentions. Meanwhile, in the case of highly disruptive disasters, these positive psychological pushes are counterbalanced or even exceeded by the negative economic consequences of the disaster, which inhibit marriage intentions. These predictions are supported by an empirical analysis that relies on a difference-in-differences investigation of municipality-level nuptiality data collected in the Abruzzo region of Italy before and after the major 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature in economics and epidemiology has exploited changes in wind patterns as a source of exogenous variation to better measure the acute health effects of air pollution. Since the distribution of wind components is not randomly distributed over time and related to other weather parameters, multivariate regression models are used to adjust for these confounding factors. However, this type of analysis relies on its ability to correctly adjust for all confounding factors and extrapolate to units without empirical counterfactuals. As an alternative to current practices and to gauge the extent of these issues, we propose to implement a causal inference pipeline to embed this type of observational study within an hypothetical randomized experiment. We illustrate this approach using daily data from Paris, France, over the 2008–2018 period. Using the Neyman–Rubin potential outcomes framework, we first define the treatment of interest as the effect of North-East winds on particulate matter concentrations compared to the effects of other wind directions. We then implement a matching algorithm to approximate a pairwise randomized experiment. It adjusts nonparametrically for observed confounders while avoiding model extrapolation by discarding treated days without similar control days. We find that the effective sample size for which treated and control units are comparable is surprisingly small. It is however reassuring that results on the matched sample are consistent with a standard regression analysis of the initial data. We finally carry out a quantitative bias analysis to check whether our results could be altered by an unmeasured confounder: estimated effects seem robust to a relatively large hidden bias. Our causal inference pipeline is a principled approach to improve the design of air pollution studies based on wind patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work analyses the existence of asymmetric effects on the subjective well-being of the population of different countries in response to changes in the levels of aggregate income. Microdata from the Eurobarometer and the World Values Survey are used for the period 2000–2019. This period includes several economic changes, among which are the strong expansion at the beginning of the century, the Great Recession, and the subsequent recovery. Our study includes several groups of countries. In the broadest case, the study comprises a group of 83 countries and analyses the issue both from a global perspective as well as focusing particular attention on European countries. These asymmetric effects of economic activity are in line with behavioural economics and previous literature and allow us to determine a macroeconomic aversion to losses. The results obtained support the existence of asymmetric effects of changes in aggregate income on subjective well-being, and show that losses generated in recessions require a far more vigorous recovery if they are to be compensated for, and that they might even have permanent effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, the cooperative enterprise (CE) produces market goods and/or provides services in the interest to its members, such as communities, customers, and suppliers. The upsurge of interest in social enterprises, and their balancing of social and economic interests, has also led to a renewed interest in CEs, often seen as a specific type of social enterprise. However, from an organizational perspective, this renewed interest has been both limited and scattered over a variety of fields. In this paper, we systematically review papers on CE in the mainstream organizational literature, defined as literature in the fields of economics, business, management and sociology. Our review integrates and synthesizes the current topics in the mainstream organizational literature and provides a number of avenues for future research. In addition, we compare our findings in the organizational literature to the social issues literature as these appeared to be quite complimentary. We found multilevel studies, determination of social impact—in particular measurable impact, managerial practices for sustainable (organisational) development, and the entrepreneurial opportunity generation process as the four key avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing literature on happiness economics suggests that, together with absolute income, individual well-being is affected by relative income both horizontally (i.e. because of differences between an individual's income and that of others to whom she compares) and vertically (i.e. compared to changes in individuals' own income). Moreover, the way in which individuals value their relative situation and the distribution of income will determine how inequality affects individual well-being. This paper aims to examine the relationship between these variables in the case of China, focusing mainly on how income inequality affects subjective well-being. Using data from the CGSS, the results suggest that both absolute and relative income affect subject well-being, and that an inverted-U shaped relationship between income inequality and individual well-being appears at least for urban residents, whereas this relationship tend to be negative in the case of people living in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability has become an important and widely applied concept in the environmental economics literature. Despite the numerous studies employing an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), this model has been critiqued for its incompleteness. This article builds a modified EKC model to examine the contribution of financial development for achieving sustainable development in the case of 14 selected Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. Using the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) and Common Correlated Effects Mean Group (CCEMG) estimators, our empirical results show that the EKC hypothesis is valid for per capita CO2 emissions and ecological footprint. The results provide evidence also of the presence of linear and non-linear relationships between financial development and non-sustainability and indicate that financial development is likely to have a small long-term impact on sustainable development. This suggests that current efforts aimed at protecting the environment and achieving sustainability will be ineffective given the extent of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an innovative framework for decision making by individuals with inconsistent preferences. Practices, associations of individuals with a preference set shared by its members, provide context and unify preferences across an economy so that decision-makers are situated in social and economic structures. Our framework models the time evolution of certain attributes, emerging from the practice framework, that govern individuals' decisions and their intertemporal variation. A novel feature is that preferences are able to rank other preference sets without the need to aggregate them. Instead, the selection of a preference set is treated as a decision in its own right. Our framework explains decision making paradoxes such as the disposition effect and agency cost considerations that are frequently encountered in the behavioural finance and economics literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly assumed in the optimal auction design literature that valuations of buyers are independently drawn from a unique distribution. In this paper we study auctions under ambiguity, that is, in an environment where valuation distribution is uncertain itself, and present a linear programming approach to robust auction design problem with a discrete type space. We develop an algorithm that gives the optimal solution to the problem under certain assumptions when the seller is ambiguity averse with a finite prior set $${\mathcal {P}}$$ and the buyers are ambiguity neutral with a prior $$f\in {\mathcal {P}}$$ . We also consider the case where all parties, the buyers and the seller, are ambiguity averse, and formulate this problem as a mixed integer programming problem. Then, we propose a hybrid algorithm that enables to compute an optimal solution for the problem in reduced time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present nonlinear incentive strategies that can be applied to a class of differential games that are frequently used in the literature, in particular, in environmental economics literature. We consider a class of nonlinear incentive functions that depend on the control variables of both players and on the current value of the state variable. The strategies are constructed to allow some flexibility in the sense that, unlike the common literature on the subject, the optimal state path evolves close to the cooperative trajectory. As a consequence of this flexibility, the incentive equilibrium is credible in a larger region than the one associated with the usual linear incentive strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the economics literature, the 'psychic costs' of migration have been incorporated into theoretical models since Sjaastad (J Polit Econ 70:80-93, ). However, the existence of such costs has rarely been investigated in empirical papers. In this paper, we look at the psychic costs of migration by using alcohol problems as an indicator. Rather than comparing immigrants and natives, we look at the native-born in a single country and compare those who have lived away for a period of their lives and those who have not. We use data from the first wave of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing which is a large, nationally representative sample of older Irish adults. We find that men who lived away are more likely to have suffered from alcohol problems than men who stayed. For women, we again see a higher incidence of alcohol problems for short-term migrants. However, long-term female migrants are less likely to have suffered from alcohol problems. For these women, it seems that migration provided psychic benefits, and this is consistent with findings from other research which showed how migration provided economic independence to this group. The results remain when we adjust for endogeneity and when we use propensity score matching methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by recent policy changes across many countries, this paper discusses the rationale for various policies that target financial advice in the market for retail financial services. To set the stage, we review recent findings on how retail financial consumers make use of professional financial advice. Based on our own research, as well as other recent contributions in the economics literature, we then discuss the pros and cons of, in particular, policies that target the disclosure as well as the size and structure of commissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple majority is one of the most used decision rules in practice. However, under this decision rule, an alternative can defeat another one with very poor support. For this reason, other decision rules have been considered in the literature, such as qualified and special majorities as well as other majorities based on difference of votes. In this paper we generalize the latter mentioned voting systems by considering individual intensities of preference, and we provide some axiomatic characterizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an index to measure the agreement level of an individual preorder with respect to a collective preorder (or reference preorder). The originality of the proposed index consists in the two following facts: (i) it quantifies the agreement level between two preorders which are not necessarily complete (i.e. they may include the incomparability relation), a preference system rarely tackled in the literature and (ii) it takes into account the positions of the alternatives in the individual preorder. The proposed index is then used to compute, within the framework of a consensus preorder research, the agreement level of all group's members with respect to a collective preorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies both pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors affecting happiness—an issue that has sparked a great deal of interest in the economic literature. Using an ordered Probit model and the 1998 general social survey (GSS) data, the paper empirically demonstrates the extent to which socioeconomic and demographic variables along with faith and emotionally based factors may determine happiness. The 1998 survey was conducted nearly at the conclusion of one of the longest economic expansion—a high income low inflation era in the US history. However, the findings tend to suggest that the absolute value of nominal income insignificantly, but non-pecuniary elements (faith and emotionally based factors including financial security) significantly determine happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dual role of price, as a product attribute signaling quality and as a measure of sacrifice, serving as a benchmark for comparing the utility gains from superior product quality, is now well established in the marketing and economic literature. However, knowledge about their long-run impact and the influence of competition on these effects still remains very sparse. In the current paper, with reference to a dynamic and competitive framework, an analytical model is proposed to help determining optimal decision rules for price incorporating both roles. The main results are as follows: (i) The optimal pricing policy is determined as a Nash equilibrium strategy. (ii) The resulting equilibrium price is higher than an equilibrium that disregards the carryover price effects. (iii) For a symmetric competition, we provide normative rules on how firms should set prices as a function of the perceived quality; particularly, how the price should be set initially, when there is little product familiarity and the perceived quality is low, and how this price should vary as the perceived quality increases. (iv) At steady state, we find that the level of equilibrium margin, in percentage terms, decreases with the elasticity of demand with respect to the brand price, but this decrease is moderated by the elasticity of demand with respect to the brand perceived quality, the cross elasticity of demand with respect to the competitor's perceived quality and the effect of the competitor's current price on the firm's perceived quality deterioration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic modelling is increasingly being used to evaluate the cost effectiveness of health technologies. One of the requirements for good practice in modelling is appropriate application of rates and probabilities. In spite of previous descriptions of appropriate use of rates and probabilities, confusions persist beyond a simple understanding of their definitions. The objective of this article is to provide a concise guide to understanding the issues surrounding the use of rates and probabilities reported in the literature in economic models, and an understanding of when and how to transform them appropriately. The article begins by defining rates and probabilities and shows the essential difference between the two measures. Appropriate conversions between rates and probabilities are discussed, and simple examples are provided to illustrate the techniques and pitfalls. How the transformed rates and probabilities may be used in economic models is then described and some recommendations are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an author's reply to comments on the article "The Economics of Follow-On Drug Research and Development: Trends in Entry Rates and the Timing of Development," which was previously published in the journal "Pharmacoeconomics." The discussions presented illustrate various economic considerations that impinge on the incentives for developing new drugs.

Review Symposium on Sunny Y. Auyang's Foundations of Complex-System Theories in Economics, Evolutionary Biology, and Statistical Physics . Author's Outline. By Evelyn Fox Keller. By Jeremy C. Ahouse. By Michael Redhead. By David Colander. By Stephen H. Kellert. Author's Response [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]