Econometricians develop and use methods and techniques to model economic behavior, create forecasts, to do policy evaluation, and to develop scenarios. Often, this ends up in advice. This advice can relate to a prediction for the future or for another sector or country, it can be a judgment on whether a policy measure was successful or not, or suggest a possible range of futures. Econometricians (must) make choices that can often only be understood by fellow econometricians. A key claim in this book is that it is important to be clear on those choices. This introductory chapter briefly describes the contents of all following chapters.

A reading of the literature on cognitive hierarchies leaves the impression that a subject’s type is predetermined before she comes into the lab so that the distribution of types is exogenous and immutable across games. In this chapter we view the choice of a person’s cognitive level as endogenous and explain it by focusing on subject’s ’expectations about the cognitive levels endogenously chosen by others. We run a set of experiments using the two-thirds guessing game where subjects receive public advice offered by a set of advisors. We discover that certain types of public advice, those that are commonly interpreted as meaningful, are capable of shifting the distribution of observed cognitive types, indicating that the distribution is endogenous.

While the mechanisms that economists design are typically static, one-shot games, in the real world, mechanisms are used repeatedly by generations of agents who engage in them for a short period of time and then pass on advice to their successors. Hence, behavior evolves via social learning and may diverge dramatically from that envisioned by the designer. We demonstrate that this is true of school matching mechanisms – even those for which truth-telling is a dominant strategy. Our results indicate that experience with an incentive-compatible mechanism may not foster truthful revelation if that experience is achieved via social learning.

Since advice is central to what we are discussing here, it might be worthwhile to spend some time simply thinking about what advice is, what are the different types of advice we might come upon in our daily lives, and how advice is treated by different academic disciplines. That is what we do here. We ... first define what advice is, then categorize advice into some common-sense categories without expecting our categories to be either exhaustive or mutually exclusive. Finally, we discuss the way advice is treated in the economics and psychology literature, and contrast their approaches to the topic. In our next chapter, we turn our attention to conventions of behavior and the intergenerational games determining them.

In recent years there has been a great deal of interest in designing matching mechanisms that can be used to match public school students to schools (the student matching problem). The premise of this chapter is that, when testing mechanisms, we must do so in the environment in which they are used in the real world rather than in the environment envisioned by theory. More precisely, in theory, the school matching problem is a static one-shot game played by parents of children seeking places in a finite number of schools and played non-cooperatively without any form of communication or commitment between parents. However, in the real world, the school choice program is played out in a different manner. Typically, parents choose their strategies after consulting with other parents in their social networks and exchanging advice on both the quality of schools and the proper way they should play the “school matching game”. The question we ask here is whether chat between parents affects the strategies they choose, and if so, whether it does so in a welfare-increasing or welfare-decreasing manner. We find that advice received by chatting has proven to have a very powerful influence on decision makers, in the sense that advice tends not only to be followed but typically has a welfare-increasing consequence.

This is a book on advice, its importance for decision making, and its influence on the evolution of conventions of behavior. The idea is simple. As societies progress, old generations of social agents die and are replaced by new ones. We are interested in what happens in this transition as the old guard instructs the new arrivals about the wisdom of their ways. Do new entrants listen to and follow the advice of their elders or dismiss it? Is intergenerational advice welfare-improving or can it be destructive? Many times wise advice is rejected only to have new generations repeat the mistakes of their parents instead of learning from them. The advice offered from one generation to the next allows for a type of social learning that leads to the creation of conventions of behavior.

The concept of productive sexual continence was widespread in the nineteenth century. Writing on sexual health, medical and otherwise, agreed that excessive sexual activity involved a loss that threatened one’s health or wellbeing, though disagreed over how much was too much. And although suspicion of prolonged continence was common, many inferred that if sex lost something precious then continence must involve gain. The chapter begins with medicine, finding that productive continence was worked into thinking about the sexual body even as conceptions of sexuality and bodily function changed dramatically. It then looks at influential popular and intellectual genres to which a similar concept of continence was important: quack adverts, advice for young men, New Women literature, nineteenth-century Platonism, and the Oxford Movement. In this literature, unlike medical writing, the idea was often extended to women with the justification that sexual activity involved a loss of some spiritual or emotional quality rather than physical substance. It was a concept that would have been very difficult to avoid in the nineteenth century and would have been plausible to both men and women.

This first chapter traces the characteristics and development of the mirror literatures in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. It discusses the range of forms and styles, and the varied functions, of these advisory texts, and their generic designations in the original languages. The chapter identifies and discusses four major periods: the Early or Formative Period (eighth and ninth centuries); the Early Middle Period (tenth to twelfth centuries); the Later Middle Period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries); the Early Modern Period. At several points, the discussion indicates parallels and affinities among the mirror literatures produced in contemporaneous Muslim and Christian settings. The chapter ends with a discussion of the appearance, presentation and reception of mirrors for princes.

This chapter explores framing as a concept that might enrich our understanding of epistemic governance and the politics of legal expertise. Section II offers a brief snapshot of framing’s invocation in a range of disciplinary fields. Section III interrogates how legal experts deploy framing to influence policy choice in the advisory process. Section IV discusses issues of frame contestation and change, drawing on convention theory, developed by the French sociologist Luc Boltanski. Section V concludes with a brief reflection on the future of framing.

Part I covers the death arts that focus on the period leading up to and concluding with the advent of death. Both philosophical and biblical traditions enjoined the early modern individual to prepare physically, mentally, and spiritually for the day that he or she would die. In addition to ensuring that one’s worldly goods were in order and left to the most suitable survivors, preparation entailed attending to the health of one’s soul: one would repent of sin, cultivate a legacy of virtue, and contemplate the four last things – Death, Judgement Day, Heaven, and Hell. The primary means of instructing the religiously minded in how to die well were ars moriendi treatises, several of which are represented here. Modernized and annotated excerpts also represent many other genres, high and low, that directed readers to look deathward. Devotional and theological works, conduct manuals, emblem books, calendars, ballads, and last dying speeches illustrate not only exemplars of good and bad dying but also the various arts whereby readers could prepare themselves for the afterlife. Throughout the excerpts, the confessional and political implications of the death arts are highlighted.

Addressing sexual health and sexual problems of patients, needs and education, and training in patient-centered, non-judgmental communication to help patients talk about intimate issues in an open way, thus providing emotional relief, feelings of acceptance and helping patients to understand the factors which contribute to problems, and the possible solutions

This chapter addresses action ascription in everyday advice-giving sequences, with a focus on those sequences in which advice has not been solicited as such. We argue that for action ascription in both second and third positions, the design (‘composition’) and the sequential location (‘position’) of the prior turn are crucial. Advice-giving typically emerges in the environment of a complaint or troubles-telling; in second position, the recipient must then decide whether or not it warrants advice. In third position, the recipient of a piece of advice must decide how exactly it was meant: as a binding prescription or injunction, or as a mild suggestion for a possible way forward? This is relevant for the advice-recipient in deciding how to deal with the advice: whether to accept or reject/resist it, or to join the other in brainstorming about how to remedy the situation. Relatively strong deontic formats position advice-givers as experts who know best what their interlocutor ‘needs’, and tend to be resisted; weaker formats call on the recipient not so much to accept or reject the advice given as to acknowledge or agree that the action in question would be a possible course of action with beneficial effects.