Policy analyses frequently clash. Their disagreements stem from many sources, including models, empirical estimates, and values such as who should have standing and how different criteria should be weighted. We provide a simple taxonomy of disagreement, identifying distinct categories within...

Consumerism arises when patients acquire and use medical information from sources apart from their physicians, such as the Internet and direct-to-patient advertising. Consumerism has been hailed as a means of improving quality. This need not be the result. Consumerist patients place additional...

Many empirical studies assess the effectiveness of reputation mechanisms, such as eBay's Feedback Forum. These investigations involve products ranging from pennies to collector guitars; they vary widely in their conclusions on how well reputation systems perform. Part of the explanation for the...

A seller faces a buyer with unknown reservation value. We show that buyer risk aversion can make it in the seller's interest to haggle. That is, the seller should make an initial offer and then, if it is rejected, make a second offer with some probability strictly less than one. This is true...

This paper employs experiments to determine how effectively arrangements decreasing the expected cost of trust betrayal foster trust in three Gulf countries (Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates), and two Western countries (Switzerland and the United States). Our basic instrument elicits...

This paper employs experiments to examine the effects of social comparisons in ultimatum bargaining. We inform responders on the average offer before they decide whether to accept or reject their specific offer. To provide a metric for social comparison effects, we compare them with another...

We consider mechanism design in social choice problems in which agents’ types are continuous, multidimensional, and mutually payoff-relevant, and there are three or more agents. If the center receives a signal that is stochastically related to the agents’ types and direct returns are...

Both criminal and regulatory law have traditionally been skeptical of what Jeremy Bentham referred to as evidentiary offenses – the prohibition (or regulation) of some activity not because it is wrong, but because it probabilistically (but not universally) indicates that a real wrong has...

From David Ricardo making a fortune buying British government bonds on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo to Warren Buffett selling insurance to the California earthquake authority, the wisest investors have earned extraordinary returns by investing in the unknown and the unknowable (UU). But...

This article addresses the challenge of managing uncertainty when producing estimative intelligence. Much of the theory and practice of estimative intelligence aims to eliminate or reduce uncertainty, but this is often impossible or infeasible. This article instead argues that the goal of...