To trust is to risk. When we lend someone money, we make ourselves vulnerable, hoping or expecting that the borrower will reward our trust and return the money at a later stage, possibly with interest or a reciprocal favor added. This paper examines whether willingness to trust follows the same...

Money is the prime incentive in economic models. Recent evidence makes it clear that people are also greatly concerned about how their incomes compare with those of others, suggesting that rank may be a strong motivator as well. Three experiments in Vietnam assessed whether students in...

Pharmaceutical expenditures have grown rapidly in recent decades, and now total nearly 10% of health care costs. Generic drug utilization has risen substantially alongside, from 19% of scripts in 1984 to 47% in 2001, thus tempering expenditure growth through significant direct dollar savings....

We analyze the informational content of more than 1.2 million stock picks provided by more than 60,000 individuals from November 1, 2006 to October 31, 2007 on the CAPS open access website created by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). On average, an individual pick in CAPS outperformed...

We test whether and how membership in the upper class affects ethical behavior in a large representative population sample. Using objective measures of socioeconomic status to define class, we find no evidence of a general tendency for upper class to be less ethical, although we do replicate...

There is a low but uncertain probability that climate change could trigger “mega-catastrophes,†severe and at least partly irreversible adverse effects across broad regions. This paper first discusses the state of current knowledge and the defining characteristics of potential climate...

Background: Recent evidence suggests that individual variation in risk taking is partly due to genetic factors. Methodology/Principal Findings: We explore how self-reported risk taking in different domains correlates with variation in the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4). Past studies conflict...

Why is private investment so low in Gulf compared to Western countries? We investigate cross-regional differences in trust and reference points for trustworthiness as possible factors. Experiments controlling for cross-regional differences in institutions and beliefs about trustworthiness reveal...

Individuals tend toward status quo bias: preferring existing options over new ones. There is a countervailing phenomenon: Humans naturally dispose of objects that disgust them, such as foul-smelling food. But what if the source of disgust is independent of the object? We induced disgust via a...

Catastrophic risks differ in terms of their natural or human origins, their possible amplification by human behaviors, and the relationships between those who create the risks and those who suffer the losses. Given their disparate anatomies, catastrophic risks generally require tailored...