As internet penetration rapidly expanded throughout the world, press freedom and government accountability improved in some countries but backslid in others. We propose a formal model that provides a mechanism that explains the observed divergent paths of countries. We argue that increased access to social media makes partial capture, where governments allow limited freedom of the press, an untenable strategy. By amplifying the influence of small traditional media outlets, higher internet access increases both the costs of capture and the risk that a critical mass of citizens will become informed and overturn the incumbent. Depending on the incentives to retain office, greater internet access thus either forces an incumbent to extend capture to small outlets, further undermining press freedom; or relieve pressure from others. We relate our findings to the cases of Turkey and Tunisia.

This paper revisits and fine-tunes a spin-off from Knight's (1921, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit) influential distinction between risk (‘probability of unknown events’) and uncertainty (‘unquantifiable randomness’): the contrast between actuarial institutions and entrepreneurship. It contends that this opposition is not exclusive and argues that the act of insurance does not automatically reduce entrepreneurial profits. To maintain this claim, the paper emphasizes hedging and, more specifically, draws on an innovative actuarial scheme – parametric (or index-based) insurance – which, unlike indemnity-based insurance, does not rely on a damage assessment but indemnifies the policyholder according to the variation of an index. This argument sheds new light on the function habitually assigned to actuarial institutions, amends the theory of entrepreneurial profits, and integrates hedging within entrepreneurial judgment.

The class of distortion riskmetrics is defined through signed Choquet integrals, and it includes many classic risk measures, deviation measures, and other functionals in the literature of finance and actuarial science. We obtain characterization, finiteness, convexity, and continuity results on general model spaces, extending various results in the existing literature on distortion risk measures and signed Choquet integrals. This paper offers a comprehensive toolkit of theoretical results on distortion riskmetrics which are ready for use in applications.

In 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finalized its rear visibility regulation, which requires cameras in all new vehicles, with the goal of allowing drivers to see what is behind them and thus reducing backover accidents. In 2018, the Trump administration embraced the regulation. The rear visibility rule raises numerous puzzles. First, Congress’ grant of authority was essentially standardless – perhaps the most open-ended in all of federal regulatory law. Second, it is not easy to identify a market failure to justify the regulation. Third, the monetized costs of the regulation greatly exceeded the monetized benefits, and yet on welfare grounds, the regulation can plausibly be counted as a significant success. Rearview cameras produce a set of benefits that are hard to quantify, including increased ease of driving, and those benefits might have been made a part of “breakeven analysis,” accompanying standard cost-benefit analysis. In addition, rearview cameras significantly improve the experience of driving, and it is plausible to think that in deciding whether to demand them, many vehicle purchasers did not sufficiently anticipate that improvement. This is a problem of limited foresight; rearview cameras are “experience goods.” A survey conducted in 2019 strongly supports this proposition, finding that about 56 % of consumers would demand at least $300 to buy a car without a rearview camera, and that fewer than 6 % would demand $50 or less. Almost all of that 6 % consists of people who do not own a car with a rearview camera. (The per-person cost is usually under $50.) These conclusions have general implications for other domains in which regulation has the potential to improve social welfare, even if it fails standard cost-benefit analysis; the defining category involves situations in which people lack experience with a good whose provision might have highly beneficial welfare effects.

Whereas many others have scrutinized the Allais paradox from a theoretical angle, we study the paradox from an historical perspective and link our findings to a suggestion as to how decision theory could make use of it today. We emphasize that Allais proposed the paradox as a normative argument, concerned with ‘the rational man’ and not the ‘real man’, to use his words. Moreover, and more subtly, we argue that Allais had an unusual sense of the normative, being concerned not so much with the rationality of choices as with the rationality of the agent as a person. These two claims are buttressed by a detailed investigation – the first of its kind – of the 1952 Paris conference on risk, which set the context for the invention of the paradox, and a detailed reconstruction – also the first of its kind – of Allais’s specific normative argument from his numerous but allusive writings. The paper contrasts these interpretations of what the paradox historically represented, with how it generally came to function within decision theory from the late 1970s onwards: that is, as an empirical refutation of the expected utility hypothesis, and more specifically of the condition of von Neumann–Morgenstern independence that underlies that hypothesis. While not denying that this use of the paradox was fruitful in many ways, we propose another use that turns out also to be compatible with an experimental perspective. Following Allais’s hints on ‘the experimental definition of rationality’, this new use consists in letting the experiment itself speak of the rationality or otherwise of the subjects. In the 1970s, a short sequence of papers inspired by Allais implemented original ways of eliciting the reasons guiding the subjects’ choices, and claimed to be able to draw relevant normative consequences from this information. We end by reviewing this forgotten experimental avenue not simply historically, but with a view to recommending it for possible use by decision theorists today.

Recently a number of multi-country insurance schemes have been introduced to deal with short-term fiscal liquidity gaps after natural disasters. However, little is known about the actual underlying risk to the fiscal sector just after such events. In this paper, we estimate the risk of fiscal shortages due to tropical storms in the Caribbean. To this end, first we use a panel VAR and estimate that while government expenditure does not respond to damages due to tropical storms, there is a significant contemporaneous effect on fiscal revenue. The results also reveal that different components of expenditure and revenue respond differently to hurricane shocks. Then, employing a parametric bulk extreme value model on estimated losses due to historical events, we show that the fiscal shortage due to storms can potentially be sizeable depending on the rarity of the event, but varies considerably across islands. However, any risk assessment is fraught with considerable uncertainty, particularly for rare but potentially very damaging tropical storm strikes.

We conduct two randomized control trials designed to understand the role of information and priming on the willingness to retrench the pension system. The first entails a survey to a sample of Portuguese voters, who are randomly presented with a text providing factual information about the public pension system. The second surveys a sample of Portuguese University students, randomly presented with an alternative order of questions. We show that more literacy on the pension system has a positive impact on the individual willingness to support reforms. Given that public opinion is usually seen as an important deterrent of effective action by politicians and that the level of voters’ literacy can be influenced by policy action, this analysis may provide useful insights to policy makers faced with the challenge of reforming existent pension systems. Our analysis also suggests that priming effects should not be ignored, given their impact in individuals in the extremes of the political spectrum.

We propose a model in which financial sophistication improves portfolio returns and therefore the incentive to substitute consumption intertemporally. The model delivers an Euler equation in which consumption growth is positively correlated with financial sophistication. We test the model's prediction using panel data on consumption and financial sophistication drawn from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We find that consumption growth is positively correlated with financial sophistication, as predicted by the model. We also provide estimates of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in the range between 0.4 and 0.6.

We attempt to value health risks by combining traditional demand impact analysis with direct elicitation of individuals' risk perceptions of food safety. We examine the impact of multiple risks of related goods on consumption of a risky good. We argue that the consumption of a risky good depends on both its absolute risk level and its relative risks to other risky goods. Seafood consumption in eastern North Carolina was studied. We elicited, in a survey, individual perceived risks as reference points to derive the economic value of reducing health risk in seafood consumption. Revealed and stated data were combined to trace out demand changes in response to absolute and relative risk reductions. Our results show that seafood consumption is affected by the perceived absolute risk and by the relative risk to poultry and that individuals react to the multiple risks in a nonlinear way, as was suggested by our analytical model.

This paper explores the effect farmer perceptions concerning how best management practice (BMP) adoption changes the profit distribution have on BMP adoption incentives and the potential for insurance to increase these incentives. Adoption indifference curves illustrate the effect of farmer perceptions on BMP adoption incentives and the potential for insurance to expand the set of perceptions consistent with adoption. Empirical analysis quantifies these conceptual results for nutrient BMP insurance, a new policy available to corn farmers as part of a USDA-Risk Management Agency pilot program in four states. Results indicate that nutrient BMP insurance can have economically relevant effects on farmer adoption incentives.

An agronomic crop growth model—the Decision Support System for Agro-Technology Transfer—and a constant relative risk aversion utility function are used to examine corn irrigation strategies in Mitchell County, Georgia. Precipitation contracts are designed to help farmers manage risk. Three conclusions originate from the findings. First, the optimal irrigation strategy can greatly increase producers' certainty-equivalent revenue. Second, changes in water pricing policy would have a limited impact on the amount of water used. And third, across levels of risk preference, the precipitation contracts are not effective in increasing certainty-equivalent revenue or reducing cumulative water use.

We present an intertemporal portfolio choice model where individuals invest in financial literacy, save, allocate their wealth between a safe and a risky asset, and receive a pension when they retire. Financial literacy affects the excess return from and cost of stock-market participation. Investors simultaneously choose how much to save, their portfolio allocation, and the optimal investment in financial literacy. The model implies that one should observe a positive correlation between stock-market participation (and risky asset share, conditional on participation) and financial literacy, and a negative correlation between the generosity of the social security system and financial literacy. The model also implies that financial literacy accumulated early in life is positively correlated with the individual's wealth and portfolio allocations in later life. Using microeconomic cross-country data, we find support for these predictions.

Différentes heuristiques ont été avancées par les psychologues et les économistes afin de rendre compte des comportements sur les marchés financiers. Elles soulignent les biais cognitifs qui affectent les croyances individuelles, et s'efforcent d'expliquer dans une certaine mesure les anomalies constatées sur les marchés financiers. L'expérimentation menée vise à tester les heuristiques de conservatisme, de représentativité et d'ancrage-ajustement dans un contexte dynamique de quinze périodes : les sujets reçoivent, à chaque période, une information financière et révisent individuellement leurs croyances quant à la qualité d'une entreprise. Les croyances observées s'avèrent incompatibles avec l'hypothèse de révision bayésienne: les sujets ont tendance à surévaluer les petites probabilités et à sous-évaluer les fortes probabilités. L'heuristique de représentativité est, de la même manière, invalidée : le traitement économétrique montre que les sujets sous-pondèrent les signaux les plus intenses, preuve qu'ils ne tirent pas parti de leurs intensités informationnelles. Les hypothèses de conservatisme et d'ancrage-ajustement sont au contraire conjointement validées : les sujets sous-pondèrent l'information nouvelle quand ils révisent leurs croyances mais ce comportement de révision est pleinement conditionné au fait que les sujets s'écartent ou se rapprochent d'une valeur d'ancrage.

This paper studies banking liquidity crises under the assumption that the government may have private benefits in bailing-out a collapsing banking sector for reputation concerns. This political distortion feeds political uncertainty, as citizens may not agree with a bailout decision and overthrow the government. This paper shows that higher political uncertainty increases both financial and political instabilities as it enlarges the set of parameters for which bank runs and the dismissal of the government are optimal. Higher political uncertainty may stem from the occurrence of a politico-financial crisis in another similar country. Contagion takes place if citizens update their beliefs on the type of their government. Doing so, they may reinforce their beliefs that the government is self-interested and bank bailouts are not socially optimal.

Cet article est une étude empirique de la formation des croyances de survie et de leur impact sur les décisions en matière de contrats d'assurance décès. L'étude est menée sur un échantillon d'individus entre 45 et 65 ans, qui ont été interrogés sur leurs croyances de survie, leurs caractéristiques de santé, leur situation socio-économique ainsi que sur les caractéristiques des contrats d'assurance décès qu'ils possèdent. L'impact des différentes maladies et du fait de fumer sur la croyance de survie observé confirme la rationalité des personnes interrogées. Les caractéristiques objectives ne sont cependant pas suffisantes pour expliquer les croyances car, une fois leur effet isolé, il reste un important élément subjectif, qui peut être lié à l'attitude vis-à-vis de l'incertitude. On montre par ailleurs que les décisions d'achat d'assurance décès et du capital assuré semblent prises séparément. On observe en effet que les variables expliquant les deux décisions ne sont pas identiques.