Related papers: When do Default Nudges Work?
If we can lower the number of people needed to vaccinate for a community to be immune against contagious diseases, we can save resources and life. A key to reach such a lower threshold of immunization is to find and vaccinate people who,…
Covid-19 has caused hundred of thousands of deaths and an economic damage amounting to trillions of dollars, creating a desire for the rapid development of vaccine. Once available, vaccine is gradually produced, evoking the question on how…
Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…
Human social dilemmas are often shaped by actions involving uncertain goals and returns that may only be achieved in the future. Climate action, voluntary vaccination and other prospective choices stand as paramount examples of this…
We propose a simple rule of thumb for countries which have embarked on a vaccination campaign while still facing the need to keep non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) in place because of the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2. If the aim is to…
Sparse rewards are double-edged training signals in reinforcement learning: easy to design but hard to optimize. Intrinsic motivation guidances have thus been developed toward alleviating the resulting exploration problem. They usually…
Considering the global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), around the world several vaccines are being developed. Till now, these vaccines are the most effective way to reduce the high burden on the global health…
Vaccination against COVID-19 with the recently approved mRNA vaccines BNT162b2 (BioNTech/Pfizer) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) is currently underway in a large number of countries. However, high incidence rates and rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2…
Miss-information is usually adjusted to fit distinct narratives and can propagate rapidly through communities of interest, which work as echo chambers, cause reinforcement and foster confirmation bias. False beliefs, once adopted, are…
An analysis drawing on Signal Detection Theory suggests that people may fall for misinformation because they are unable to discern true from false information (truth insensitivity) or because they tend to accept information with a…
Nudging is a behavioral strategy aimed at influencing people's thoughts and actions. Nudging techniques can be found in many situations in our daily lives, and these nudging techniques can targeted at human fast and unconscious thinking,…
Cognition, a component of human capital, is fundamental for decision-making, and understanding the causes of human capital depreciation in old age is especially important in aging societies. Using various proxy measures of cognitive…
During the Covid-19 pandemic a key role is played by vaccination to combat the virus. There are many possible policies for prioritizing vaccines, and different criteria for optimization: minimize death, time to herd immunity, functioning of…
Ageing populations in developing countries have spurred the introduction of public pension programs to preserve the standard of living for the elderly. The often-overlooked mechanism of intergenerational transfers, however, can dampen these…
In this paper, we study the trending behaviour of COVID-19 data at country level, and draw attention to some existing econometric tools which are potentially helpful to understand the trend better in future studies. In our empirical study,…
Now that various countries are or will soon be moving towards relaxing shelter-in-place rules, it is important that people use a face covering, to avoid an exponential resurgence of the spreading of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Here…
Many societal challenges, such as climate change or disease outbreaks, require coordinated behavioral changes. For many behaviors, the tendency of individuals to adhere to social norms can reinforce the status quo. However, these same…
This paper studies whether and how differently projected information about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic affects individuals' prosocial behavior and expectations on future outcomes. We conducted an online experiment with British…
Policymakers often choose a policy bundle that is a combination of different interventions in different dosages. We develop a new technique -- treatment variant aggregation (TVA) -- to select a policy from a large factorial design. TVA…