Long Weekend Links

1. TED Interview from a few months back with Julian Assange, explaining the philosophy behind Wikileaks. There has been a lot of discussion about the implication of the development of volunteer-driven mass collaborative enterprises for standard economics. But it is arguable that the development of wikileaks is a more profound development than previous collaborative exercises. This is a global information resource driven by volunteers and donations, with some of the providers taking enormous risks to make information available.

2. On the theme of global developments driven by non-standard preferences, this TED talk from the founder of kiva.org is well worth watching (warning: contains a lot of emotional pleas that may be unsuitable for an older and more cynical audience).

3. DG Sanco Conference on "Behavioural Economics. So What: Should PolicyMakers Care". This will be livestreamed is worth tuning in to.

"At European level, behavioural economics is implicitly starting to be incorporated in policymaking and this has led to some cases of debiasing through law. The cooling-off period, found in much of EU consumer acquis, and the health claims proposal are two significant examples. In addition, an in-depth review of the behavioural literature provided evidence for the inclusion of a ban on pre-checked boxes in the recent proposal for a Consumer Rights Directive. Finally, the useful contribution of behavioural economics has explicitly been recognised by DG Competition as part of the solution in a recent Microsoft case, when designing the browser ballot box. Similarly, Regulatory bodies across of the world (e.g., US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), UK Office for Fair Trading, OECD, Australian Productivity Commission) have already started to take behavioural economics into serious consideration and have already carried out behavioural studies to inform some of their regulatory policies."

4. Programme for AEA 2011 is available on this link

5. Meier and Springer - Discounting and Defaulting: Evidence from Choice Experiments Matched to Administrative Credit Data

6. Brigitte Madrian NBER summary of savings and investment behaviour 

Weekend Links

1. Economics, Psychology and the history of consumer choice theory Hands (2010). Cambridge Journal of Economics. 

This paper examines elements of the complex place/role/influence of psychology in the history of consumer choice theory. The paper reviews, and then challenges, the standard narrative that psychology was ‘in’ consumer choice theory early in the neoclassical revolution, then strictly ‘out’ during the ordinal and revealed preference revolutions, now (possibly) back in with recent developments in experimental, behavioural and neuroeconomics. The paper uses the work of three particular economic theorists to challenge this standard narrative and then provides an alternative interpretation of the history of the relationship between psychology and consumer choice theory.

2.  Zizzo (2010). Experimental Demand Effects in Economics

3. Harrison and Ross (2010). "The Methodologies of Neuroeconomics"- really interesting critique of aspects of neuroeconomic methodologies

4. Workplace Wellness Programmes Can Generate Savings - Health Affairs (2010)

Katherine Baicker^1,*, David Cutler² and Zirui Song^3
1 Katherine Baicker (Kbaicker@hsph.harvard.edu) is a professor of health economics at the School of Public Health, Harvard University, in Boston, Massachusetts.
² David Cutler is a professor of economics at Harvard University.
³ Zirui Song is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Medical School.
*Corresponding author
Amid soaring health spending, there is growing interest in workplace disease prevention and wellness programs to improve health and lower costs. In a critical meta-analysis of the literature on costs and savings associated with such programs, we found that medical costs fall by about $3.27 for every dollar spent on wellness programs and that absenteeism costs fall by about $2.73 for every dollar spent. Although further exploration of the mechanisms at work and broader applicability of the findings is needed, this return on investment suggests that the wider adoption of such programs could prove beneficial for budgets and productivity as well as health outcomes.

Key Words: Cost of Health Care • Health Promotion/Disease Prevention

5. Simolean Sense blog does a very nice weekly roundup of behavioural topic. In general, this blog is doing a very good job at harvesting relevant behavioural links from round the web. 

6. Dan Gilbert NYT article on the psychology of numbers