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The 2D: 4D digit ratio, the ratio of the length of the second finger to the length of the fourth finger, is often considered a proxy for testosterone exposure in utero. A recent study reported, among other things, an association between the left-hand 2D:4D and self-employment in a sample of 974 adults. In this preregistered study, we replicate the 2D:4D results on a sample of more than 2100 adults from the German Socioeconomic Panel-Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). We find no statistically significant associations between 2D:4D and self-employment.

Additional co-authors: Ivan Ropovik, Balazs Aczel, Lena F. Aeschbach, Luca Andrighetto, Jack D. Arnal, Holly Arrow, Peter Babincak, Bence E. Bakos, Gabriel Banik, Ernest Baskin, Radomir Belopavlovic, Michael H. Bernstein, Michal Bialek, Nicholas G. Bloxsom, Bojana Bodroža, Diane B. V. Bonfiglio, Leanne Boucher, Florian Bruhlmann, Claudia C. Brumbaugh, Erica Casini, Yiling Chen, Carlo Chiorri, William J. Chopik, Oliver Christ, Antonia M. Ciunci, Heather M. Claypool, Sean Coary, Marija V. Cˇolic, W. Matthew Collins, Paul G. Curran, Chris R. Day, Anna Dreber, John E. Edlund, Filipe Falcao, Anna Fedor, Lily Feinberg, Ian R. Ferguson, Maire Ford, Michael C. Frank, Emily Fryberger, Alexander Garinther, Katarzyna Gawryluk, Kayla Ashbaugh, Mauro Giacomantonio, Steffen R. Giessner, Jon E. Grahe, Rosanna E. Guadagno, Ewa Halasa, Rias A. Hilliard, Joachim Huffmeier, Sean Hughes, Katarzyna Idzikowska, Michael Inzlicht, Alan Jern, William Jimenez-Leal, Magnus Johannesson, Jennifer A. Joy-Gaba, Mathias Kauff, Danielle J. Kellier, Grecia Kessinger, Mallory C. Kidwell, Amanda M. Kimbrough, Josiah P. J. King, Vanessa S. Kolb, Sabina Kolodziej, Marton Kovacs, Karolina Krasuska, Sue Kraus, Lacy E. Krueger, Katarzyna Kuchno, Caio Ambrosio Lage, Eleanor V. Langford, Carmel A. Levitan, Tiago Jesse Souza de Lima, Hause Lin, Samuel Lins, Jia E. Loy, Dylan Manfredi, Łukasz Markiewicz, Madhavi Menon, Brett Mercier, Mitchell Metzger, Venus Meyet, Jeremy K. Miller, Andres Montealegre, Don A. Moore, Rafal Muda, Gideon Nave, Austin Lee Nichols, Sarah A. Novak, Christian Nunnally, Ana Orlic, Anna Palinkas, Angelo Panno, Kimberly P. Parks, Ivana Pedovic, Emilian Pekala, Matthew R. Penner, Sebastiaan Pessers, Boban Petrovic, Thomas Pfeiffer, Damian Pienkosz, Emanuele Preti, Danka Puric, Tiago Ramos, Jonathan Ravid, Timothy S. Razza, Katrin Rentzsch, Juliette Richetin, Sean C. Rife, Anna Dalla Rosa, Kaylis Hase Rudy, Janos Salamon, Blair Saunders, Przemyslaw Sawicki, Kathleen Schmidt, Kurt Schuepfer, Thomas Schultze, Stefan Schulz-Hardt, Astrid Schutz, Ani N. Shabazian, Rachel L. Shubella, Adam Siegel, Ruben Silva, Barbara Sioma, Lauren Skorb, Luana Elayne Cunha de Souza, Sara Steegen, L. A. R. Stein, R. Weylin Sternglanz, Darko Stojilovic, Daniel Storage, Gavin Brent Sullivan, Barnabas Szaszi, Peter Szecsi, Orsolya Szoke, Attila Szuts, Manuela Thomae, Natasha D. Tidwell, Carly Tocco, Ann-Kathrin Torka, Francis Tuerlinckx, Wolf Vanpaemel, Leigh Ann Vaughn, Michelangelo Vianello, Domenico Viganola, Maria Vlachou, Ryan J. Walker, Sophia C. Weissgerber, Aaron L. Wichman, Bradford J. Wiggins, Daniel Wolf, Michael J. Wood, David Zealley, Iris Žeželj, Mark Zrubka, and Brian A. Nosek

We experimentally test whether impartial deliberation leads to stronger concern for fairness in bargaining. In the experiment a seller can invest some of his/her time in order to generate potential gains from trade with a buyer. Conditional on investment the seller proposes how to split the gain. The buyer either accepts or rejects the seller’s offer. To vary the degree of impartiality, subjects are assigned to their roles as sellers or buyers either before (the ‘subjective group’) or after (the ‘objective group’) they read the instructions. We find that the relationship between the perceived investment cost and the bargaining proposal is significantly stronger in the objective group. This suggests that sellers in the objective group are more preoccupied with setting a fair price.

A key recommendation of the recent Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Med icine was that cost-effectiveness analyses be carried out from a societal perspective. The authors show that two of the Panel's recommendations concerning costs are not consistent with a societal perspective, and how to correct those inconsistencies. In its recommendations concerning costs resulting from morbidity, the Panel advises ex cluding lost income from costs in the belief that individuals take income changes into account when they respond to the quality-of-life questions that are used to calculate quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). It is shown that even if individuals do consider income changes in responding to these quality-of-life questions, this recommendation would seriously underestimate production losses due to morbidity, since individuals do not bear a major part of lost production. In its recommendations concerning costs resulting from mortality, the Panel does not require that health care costs for "unre lated" illness and non-health care consumption and production during added life years be included in the Reference Case. It is shown that omitting these costs will seriously distort comparisons of programs at different ages and favor programs that extend life over those that improve quality of life. This can be corrected by including total con sumption minus production in added life-years among costs. Key words: cost-effec tiveness analysis; societal perspective; public policy; resource allocation; Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. (Med Decis Making 1999; 19:371-377)

It has been shown that the difference between consumption and production during life years gained should be included as a cost in cost-effectiveness analysis. In this study the authors estimate the impact of including these future costs on the cost-effective ness of the treatment of hypertension in Sweden. The cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gained changes little among young men and women due to the addition of future costs, but increases by about $14,000 for middle-aged men and women and about $27,000 for older men and women. When future costs are not included, the cost per QALY gained is generally lowest among older men and women, but when future costs are included, the cost per QALY gained is generally lowest among middle-aged men and women. The authors conclude that the total resource consequences of changes in mortality should be routinely considered in cost-effectiveness analyses. Key words: Cost-effectiveness analysis; economic evaluation; costs; societal per spective. (Med Decis Making 1997;17:382-389)

Pliskin, Shepard, and Weinstein identified three preference conditions that ensure that quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) represent preferences over gambles over chronic health profiles. This paper presents an experimental test of the descriptive validity of two of these preference assumptions: utility independence and constant proportional tradeoff. Eighty students at the Stockholm School of Economics and 92 students at Erasmus University Rotterdam participated in the experiment. The results of the ex periment support the descriptive validity of constant proportional tradeoff: both within groups and between groups constant proportional tradeoff could not be rejected. The results are less supportive of the descriptive validity of utility independence. Within- groups utility independence was rejected. Between-groups utility independence could not be rejected, but this may have been due to a lack of statistical power. Analysis of the individual responses revealed that without adjustment for imprecision of preference, 39 respondents (22.8%) satisfied constant proportional tradeoff. Twenty-three respon dents (13.4%) satisfied utility independence without adjustment for imprecision of pref erence. However, because of the relative unfamiliarity of the respondents with both the health states to be evaluated and the methods of health-state-utility measurement, it is likely that the respondents' preferences were imprecise. Adjusted for imprecision of preference, the upper estimates of the proportions of respondents who satisfied constant proportional tradeoff and utility independence, respectively, were 90.1% (155 respondents) and 75.6% (130 respondents). Pliskin et al. further derived that if an individual's preferences satisfy both constant proportional tradeoff and utility indepen dence, then these preferences can be represented by a more general, risk-adjusted QALY model. Without adjustment for imprecision of preference, ten respondents (5.8%) satisfied both constant proportional tradeoff and utility independence. Adjusted for imprecision of preference, the upper estimate of the proportion of respondents who satisfied both constant proportional tradeoff and utility independence was 68.6% (118 respondents). The results of this study indicate that constant proportional tradeoff holds approximately. The evidence is much weaker for utility independence, however. This has important implications for the use of QALY-type measures in medical decision making. Key words: QALYs; health utility measurements; medical decision making; individual preferences. (Med Decis Making 1996;17:21-32)

To compare the costs of health care programs with the benefits, the values of changes in health status must be expressed in monetary terms. The development of methods to estimate willingness to pay for changes in health status is therefore of interest. This paper reports the results of a contingent valuation study measuring willingness to pay for reductions in angina pectoris attacks. An innovative study design allowed analysis of the data on willingness to pay using two approaches, a binary question and a bid ding-game technique. Percentage reductions in anginal attacks were varied randomly in different subsamples, and data were collected about angina pectoris status, attack rate, and income to test the internal validity of the contingent valuation method. Will ingness to pay for a 50% reduction in the attack rate for three months was estimated to be about SEK 2,500 ($345) with the binary approach, and about SEK 2,100 ($290) using the bidding-game technique. Regression analyses showed that income, angina pectoris status, attack rate, and percentage reduction in attack rate were all related to willingness to pay, in agreement with the authors' hypothesis. Key words: willingness to pay; contingent valuation; angina pectoris; cost-benefit analysis. (Med Decis Mak ing 1996;16:248-253)

The theoretical model of QALYs is based on risk neutrality with respect to life years or constant proportional risk posture with respect to life years. It is shown that discounting of QALYs is inconsistent with these assumptions. For discounting to be consistent with individual preferences in a QALY model, individuals have to be risk-neutral with respect to discounted life years or exhibit constant proportional risk posture with respect to discounted life years. For the time-tradeoff method to be consistent with these assumptions, the QALY weights have to be derived by dividing the number of discounted life years in full health by the number of discounted life years in the assessed health states. Key words: quality-adjusted life years; discounting; time tradeoff; standard gamble; individual preferences. (Med Decis Making 1994;14:188-193)