As the adage goes, “money makes the world go round” – but which direction does it spin? This analysis considers how basic decision research can help us work out how to answer this question. It suggests that the difficulty of deriving clear predictions based on existing decision research is at least partly rooted in two restrictive conventions. The first is the focus on deviations from rational choice, and the effort to capture observed deviations by assuming subjective value functions. While it is difficult to reject the hypothesis that choice behavior reflects the weighting of subjective values, it is not clear that it advances the derivation of useful predictions. A second restrictive convention is the focus on objective hypothesis testing, which favors analyses that evaluate small refinements of the popular models. The potential benefits of relaxing these conventions are considered, with reference to recent choice prediction competitions that facilitate the exploration of distinct assumptions and model development techniques. The winners in these competitions assume very different decision processes than those assumed by the popular “subjective functions” models. The relationship of the results to the big data revolution is discussed.

Testimony by disabled people concerning the relationship between their experiences and overall well-being has long been an object of social scientific and humanistic study. Often discussed in terms of “the disability paradox,” these studies contrast the intuitive horribleness of certain impaired states against the testimonial evidence suggesting that people in such states do not in fact experience their lives as horrible. Explanations for why such testimonial evidence is suspect range from claims about adaptive preferences to issues of qualitative research methodology. In this paper, I argue that the problem lies not with the evidence, but the intuitions in question. Using the disability paradox as a case study, I further argue against the use of the concept of intuitive horribleness in social epistemology. I contend that testimonial and hermeneutical injustices are baked into most deployments of the concept, and even if one were to justify its use in select cases, it should be accompanied with prima facie suspicion. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of this analysis for the literature on transformative experience and also for the stakes of multi-cultural, historically informed philosophical analyses more generally.

Some public sectors provide cash-balance pension plans with guaranteed interest credits. We use the certainty-equivalence framework to derive the subjective value of the guarantee perceived by the participant. Numerical results show that in many scenarios the subjective value is lower than the cost of the guarantee derived by option pricing approaches, implying that public sectors potentially spend too much in providing the guarantee. However, the subjective value could be higher than the cost of the guarantee under some scenarios, depending on the participant's level of risk aversion, the feasibility of diversification, and so forth.