This paper discusses health economics as a behavioral science and as input into health policy and health services research. I illustrate the dual role with data on publications and citations of two leading health economics journals and three leading American health economists. Five important,...

This paper uses Wald's concept of the risk of a statistical decision function to address the question: How should sample data on treatment response be used to guide treatment choices in a heterogeneous population? Statistical treatment rules (STRs) are statistical decision functions that map...

This paper extends my research applying statistical decision theory to treatment choice with sample data, using maximum regret to evaluate the performance of treatment rules. The specific new contribution is to study as-if optimization using estimates of illness probabilities in clinical choice...

There are many economic environments in which an object is offered sequentially to prospective buyers. It is often observed that once the object for sale is turned down by one or more agents, those that follow do the same. One explanation that has been proposed for this phenomenon is that agents...

The design and conduct of climate change policy necessarily confronts uncertainty along multiple fronts. We explore the consequences of ambiguity over various sources and configurations of models that impact how economic opportunities could be damaged in the future. We appeal to decision theory...

This paper examines how a firm's choice of the type of experiment impacts on its potential exploitation of new technological opportunities. It does so in the context of the failure of successful firms (or disruption) where the literature has informally suggested that firms undertake errors in...

We examine individuals' decisions to attend protests during the summer of 2020. Our analysis examines two simultaneous movements: Black Lives Matter along with protests calling for less stringent public health measures to combat the COVID-19 (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses). Our...

We examine how disadvantaged students make postsecondary education decisions, focusing on why they often opt for short, flexible programs that tend to have low returns in the labor market. Prior literature emphasizes information deficits and financial constraints. We draw upon qualitative data...

It is well established that the social and economic environment of medical care distinguishes its provision from that of other goods and services. While scholars have studied the influences of this idiosyncratic environment, there is relatively little empirical knowledge about how it affects...

A growing body of evidence suggests that decision-makers fail to account for correlation in signals that they receive. We study the relevance of this mistake in students' interactions with school-choice matching mechanisms. In a lab experiment presenting simple and incentivized school-choice...