Because risks are all on sides of social situations, it is not possible to be globally "precautionary." Hence the Precautionary Principle, in its strongest forms, runs into fatal conceptual difficulties; any precautions will themselves create hazards of one or another kind. When the...

Each government agency uses a uniform figure to measure the value of a statistical life. This is a serious mistake. The very theory that underlies current practice calls for far more individuation of the relevant values. According to that theory, the value of statistical lives should vary across...

Evidence is presented to show that people are willing to pay a premium to avoid "bad deaths"--deaths that are especially dreaded, uncontrollable, involuntarily incurred, and inequitably distributed. Public judgments of this kind help explain the demand for regulation. But some of these judgments...

For many decades, the United States has been conducting an extraordinary natural experiment: Randomly assigned three-judge panels on courts of appeals produce extensive evidence of the effect of judicial ideology on judges' votes. If the political party of the appointing president is treated as...

This book discusses social influences on individual behavior and the risk of error stemming from conformity. Special attention is given to three phenomena: individual conformity to erroneous positions held by group members; informational and reputational cascades; and group polarization, by...

In protecting safety, health, and the environment, government has increasingly relied on cost-benefit analysis. In undertaking cost-benefit analysis, the government has monetized risks of death through the idea of "value of a statistical life" (VSL), currently assessed at about $6.1 million....

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the...

Current estimates of regulatory benefits are too low, and likely far too low, because they ignore a central point about valuation - namely, that people care not only about their absolute economic position, but also about their relative economic position. We show that where the government...

A great deal of theoretical work explores the possibility that algorithms may be biased in one or another respect. But for purposes of law and policy, some of the most important empirical research finds exactly the opposite. In the context of bail decisions, an algorithm designed to predict...

In recent years, there has been a great deal of discussion of the welfare effects of digital goods, including social media. A national survey, designed to monetize the benefits of a variety of social media platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram), found a massive disparity...