Learning to live together is the central concern of education everywhere in the world. Traditional sporting games provide interpersonal experiences that shape miniature communities charged with emotional meanings. The objective of this study was to analyze the ethnomotor features of TSG in three Catalan-speaking Autonomous Communities and to interpret them for constructing emotional communities. The study followed a phenomenological-interpretative paradigm. The identification of TSG was done by a hermeneutic methodological approach by using an exhaustive exploratory documentary research. We studied 503 (...) games collected in the Dictionary Català-Valencià-Balear de Alcover and Moll. Instruments and procedure: A database was built up with information about the internal and external logic of the games. The validity of the information was confirmed by means of a concordance test between the researchers. Data processing was carried out by means of classification trees, identifying the predictive variables of the types of TSG. Most of the TSGs were sociomotor games. The classification tree identified four explanatory variables. Three variables were internal traits, and one variable corresponded to external logic. Features of the TSG of the Catalan-speaking Autonomous Communities build original emotional communities. The ethnomotor regularities triggered emotional experiences associated with pleasure for living together ; domesticating of aggressiveness over opponents ; developing sustainability ; educating the competition ; and interpersonal well-being based on the community. (shrink)

Many searches are needle-in-the-haystack problems, looking for small targets in large spaces. In such cases, blind search stands no hope of success. Success, instead, requires an assisted search. But whence the assistance required for a search to be successful? To pose the question this way suggests that successful searches do not emerge spontaneously but need themselves to be discovered via a search. The question then naturally arises whether such a higher-level “search for a search” is any easier than the original (...) search. We prove two results: (1) The Horizontal No Free Lunch Theorem, which shows that average relative performance of searches never exceeds unassisted or blind searches. (2) The Vertical No Free Lunch Theorem, which shows that the difficulty of searching for a successful search increases exponentially compared to the difficulty of the original search. (shrink)

We study the effect of transaction costs (e.g., a trading fee or a transaction tax, like the Tobin tax) on the aggregation of private information in financial markets. We analyze a financial market à la Glosten and Milgrom, in which informed and uninformed traders trade in sequence with a market maker. Traders have to pay a cost in order to trade. We show that, eventually, all informed traders decide not to trade, independently of their private information, i.e., (...) an informational cascade occurs. We replicated our financial market in the laboratory. We found that, in the experiment, informational cascades occur when the theory suggests they should. Nevertheless, the ability of the price to aggregate private information is not significantly affected. (JEL C92, D8, G14). (shrink)

The aim was to synthesize the findings of empirical research about the unmet nursing care needs of older people, mainly from their point of view, from all settings, focusing on (1) methodological approaches, (2) relevant concepts and terminology and (3) type, nature and ethical issues raised in the investigations. A scoping review after Arksey and O’Malley. Two electronic databases, MEDLINE/PubMed and CINAHL (from earliest to December 2019) were used. Systematic search protocol was developed using several terms for unmet care needs (...) and missed care. Using a three-step retrieval process, peer-reviewed, empirical studies concerning the unmet care needs of older people in care settings, published in English were included. An inductive content analysis was used to analyse the results of the included studies (n = 53). The most frequently used investigation method was the questionnaire survey seeking the opinions of older people, informal caregivers or healthcare professionals. The unmet care needs identified using the World Health Organization classification were categorized as physical, psychosocial and spiritual, and mostly described individuals’ experiences, though some discussed unmet care needs at an organizational level. The ethical issues raised related to the clinical prioritization of tasks associated with failing to carry out nursing care activities needed. The unmet care needs highlighted in this review are related to poor patient outcomes. The needs of institutionalized older patients remain under-diagnosed and thus, untreated. Negative care outcomes generate a range of serious practical issues for older people in care institutions, which, in turn, raises ethical issues that need to be addressed. Unmet care needs may lead to marginalization, discrimination and inequality in care and service delivery. Further studies are required about patients’ expectations when they are admitted to hospital settings, or training of nurses in terms of understanding the complex needs of older persons. (shrink)

Human Towers are one of the most representative traditional sporting games in Catalonia, recognized in 2010 as Intangible Cultural Heritage by the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture. The objective of this research was to study the emotional states elicited by a representative performance of the colla de Castellers de Lleida. This research is based on an ethnographic case study, with mixed methods in which 17 key informants voluntarily participated. Participant observation was used; the data were recorded in (...) a field diary and oral sources. The content analysis was done using the Atlas.ti software. An SPSS database was also created. The statistical techniques were: Descriptive statistical techniques, cross tables with Pearson's Chi-square values. We also used a classification and regression trees to examine the predictive capacity of five independent variables of emotional states. The results reveal that the comments were mostly oriented toward well-being states, The internal cooperative logic of the Human Towers enhances the intense interpersonal relationships of socio-emotional well-being. (shrink)

In order to contain public care expenditure, policymakers in the Netherlands have over the last decades formulated in ever more stringent ways what ought to be expected from spouses, partners, and family members with regard to care for dependent relatives. The current Dutch coalition cabinet plans to shift the principal responsibility for nonmedical care, including demanding forms of care such as long-term personal care, to individuals and families. I argue that these policy developments imply cost redistribution rather than cost containment (...) and that this redistribution is disadvantageous for women. (shrink)

By Belief Revision it is understood a system that logically explains the rational process of changing beliefs by taking into account a new piece of information. The most influential approach in this field of study, the AGM system, proposed by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson, postulates rationality criteria for different types of belief change. In this paper I shall assess the relationship between those criteria and argue for an opposition between the principles of Information Economy and Consistency. Furthermore, I (...) shall argue that Paraconsistent Belief Revision manages to minimise this friction in the best possible way. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the credibility value of sustainability assurance and the type of assurance provider on cost of capital. A large sample of international companies from the period 2007–2014 was used to develop our models of analysis. We find a greater decrease in cost of capital for companies that publish and assure their social and environmental reports. Thus, voluntary sustainability disclosures decrease the cost of capital. However, companies also have the opportunity to reinforce this decrease by providing an (...) assurance statement, so increasing the credibility of corporate social responsibility information. In addition, the decrease in the cost of capital is significantly higher when such assurance is provided by a top-tier accountancy firm instead of by engineering or consultancy firms; this result supports also the reputational capital of accountancy firms. (shrink)

The cost and quality of health care services can vary significantly, with high cost not necessarily indicating high quality. As consumers pay for a growing proportion of their care, they have an increased need for cost and quality information before they receive care, so they can plan and make informed decisions. Transparency tools can provide such information to consumers and others. This book examines information on cost and quality available to consumers from selected transparency tools; characteristics of (...) effective transparency tools; limitations, if any, in the effectiveness of CMS transparency tools; and CMS efforts to expand cost and quality information available through transparency tools. The book also examines how various factors affect the availability of health care price information for consumers; and the information selected public and private health care price transparency initiatives make available to consumers. (shrink)

Cost-effectiveness analysis for health interventions is traditionally conducted in a risk-neutral way, insensitive to risk attitudes in the population, which are potentially non-neutral. While the standard outcome metric of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) aims to be deferential to people's valuations of health states, cost-effectiveness analysis of risky interventions using the QALY metric is not similarly deferential to people's risk attitudes. I argue that there is no good justification for this practice. Non-neutral attitudes to risk, especially where they concern individually life-changing (...) interventions need not be irrational, and so imposing neutrality is not justifiable as a way of debiasing preferences. Many common justifications for deference to health state preferences extend to risk attitudes. But even if reasons for deference do not extend, imposition of risk neutrality as opposed to any other rationally permissible risk attitude is under-motivated as default practice. Thus, either methods for measuring risk attitudes separately and incorporating them into cost-effectiveness analysis should be used more widely or a richer set of information should be presented to political decision-makers and the public to enable them to decide how to take into account the individual risks faced by members of the population, on top of aggregate effects on population health. (shrink)

BackgroundIn the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission declared that allowing medical providers to advertise directly to consumers would be “providing the public with truthful information about the price, quality or other aspects of their service.” However, our understanding of the advertising content is highly limited.ObjectiveTo assess whether direct-to-consumer medical service advertisements provide relevant information on access, quality and cost of care, a content analysis was conducted.MethodTelevision and online advertisements for medical services directly targeting consumers were collected in two (...) major urban centres in Nevada, USA, identifying 313 television advertisements and 200 non-duplicate online advertisements.ResultsBoth television and online advertisements reliably conveyed information about the services provided and how to make an appointment. At the same time, less than half of the advertisements featured insurance information and hours of operation and less than a quarter of them contained information regarding the quality and price of care. The claims of quality were substantiated in even fewer advertisements. The scarcity of quality and cost information was more severe in television advertisements.ConclusionThere is little evidence that medical service advertising, in its current form, would contribute to lower prices or improved quality of care by providing valuable information to consumers. (shrink)

We present an analysis of Szilard's one-molecule Maxwell's demon, including a detailed entropy accounting, that suggests a general theory of the entropy cost of information. It is shown that the entropy of the demon increases during the expansion step, due to the decoupling of the molecule from the measurement information. It is also shown that there is an entropy symmetry between the measurement and erasure steps, whereby the two steps additivelv share a constant entropy change, but the proportion (...) that occurs during each of the two steps is arbitrary. Therefore the measurement step may be accompanied by an entropy increase, a decrease, or no change at all, and likewise for the erasure step. Generalizing beyond the demon, decorrelation between a physical system and information about that system always causes an entropy increase in the joint system comprised of both the original system and the information. Decorrelation causes a net entropy increase in the universe unless, as in the Szilard demon, the information is used to decrease entropy elsewhere before the correlation is lost. Thus, information is thermodynamically costly precisely to the extent that it is not used to obtain work from the measured system. (shrink)

The U.S. health care system is ostensibly market based and therefore at least partially reliant on competition and consumer demand to regulate costs. Yet information about an essential feature of market transactions—costs—is typically obscure to patients until long after treatment. When discussing what must be disclosed for informed consent, the same list of required information is often mentioned regardless of the health care system in question, and information about costs rarely merits a place within (...) this list. However, our assumptions about what a moral principle requires need to be responsive to the realities of the health care system in which the principle is applied.This paper explores the moral foundations of disclosure and informed consent to argue that, in a market‐based system of the sort found in the United States, these same considerations support a requirement to disclose out‐of‐pocket costs before patients receive care. Next, I consider two objections to this view: first, that health care practitioners should focus solely on medical considerations in their encounters with patients and, second, that disclosing out‐of‐pocket costs would be too difficult to be mandated. I argue that medical and financial interests are inseparable within the U.S. health care system. If the difficulties in disclosing costs are deemed insurmountable, then the current system may prove unsustainable, both morally and financially, since we face the same practical impediments to implementing any meaningful consumer‐driven, market‐based health care reform. Finally, I explore some of the consequences of failing to disclose costs. The requirements of disclosing costs can be supported by the principle of respect for autonomy, regardless of the consequences, but in light of the consequences of the decision of whether to disclose, a concern about justice provides further support. (shrink)

A hypothetical scenario is presented in which a female patient is admitted to a private hospital to undergo a mastectomy and breast reconstruction. The surgeons and anaesthetists conducting the different procedures charge three times the medical aid rates. When the patient asks what the co-payments are likely to be, she is informed by the doctors’ accounts section that they can only provide this information after each procedure. The patient’s medical scheme also advises her that it cannot determine the likely (...) co-payments unless she completes the assessment form sent to her. The form requires her to include the costs reflected against the relevant ICD10 codes. The patient cannot complete the form because the doctors’ accounts sections have not informed her about the proposed procedures and the likely costs of each. This article builds on a previous article discussing doctors’ overarching responsibility to disclose medical treatment costs in advance. The present article outlines the legal requirements in the South African Constitution, the National Health Act and the Health Professions Act, and refers to the Promotion of Access to Information Act and Consumer Protection Act. Similar to the earlier article, this article addresses the ethical requirements of the Health Professions Council of South Africa and the internationally recognised biomedical ethical principles. Furthermore, it also refers to the National Patients Charter, the government’s policy document on health care services. (shrink)

Autonomy, an individual's right to make personal decisions regarding his/her own health, represents one of the major ethical principles of medicine. While there are many examples citing the benefits this right provides for the individual, the impact that personal healthcare decisions have on others is often neglected. Here, evidence from end-stage renal disease is reviewed to hypothesise the creation of a universal kidney donation programme that although provides unparalleled benefits to its citizens, relies on the participation of a large proportion (...) of the society. Given that this essay also addresses the public's major concerns regarding kidney donation, one of the only remaining implementation barriers is the individuals' right not to participate. Therefore, irrespective of the humane and complex emotionally laden reasons for not enrolling in such programmes, this essay provides some estimates of the significant resource and quality of life costs associated with autonomy. Assuming humans are competent to make informed personal healthcare choices, similar to recent efforts to increase awareness about the negative impact of certain lifestyle choices on global warming, citizens should also be better informed about the medical costs their autonomy has on society. (shrink)

La publicación en abierto de los artículos conlleva unos gastos conocidos como cargos por procesamiento de artículos. El objetivo de este trabajo es determinar el coste de los artículos publicados en abierto mediante APC de autoría española en cinco categorías temáticas de las ciencias sociales: Humanities, Sociology, Information Science & Library Science, Education & Educational Research y Communication de la Colección Principal de la Web of Science durante el periodo 2012-2019. Se han identificado las revistas, las instituciones financiadoras y (...) los modelos de publicación más frecuentes. El estudio indica que de las 223 revistas que publicaron artículos con APC las que más lo hicieron fueron Communication & Society, Comunicar y el Profesional de la Información. El gasto total en APC fue de 481.120,4 € y el coste medio de 1.129 €. Las revistas con mayor coste fueron Computers & Education, Scientometrics y IEEE Transactions on Learnig Technologies. Los modelos de publicación más frecuentes fueron DOAJ Gold, Green Published y Green Accepted. En el 53% de los artículos constaba que la financiación procedía del gobierno de España, en el 25% de gobiernos autonómicos, en el 21% de la Unión Europea y en el 20% de las universidades. El coste medio de los APC de las publicaciones estudiadas está dentro de las cantidades habituales a nivel mundial, siendo más caros los APC en revistas con impacto más alto y en las áreas Information Science & Library Science y Sociology. Conocer los APC puede orientar las políticas y el apoyo institucional al acceso abierto y mejorar de los recursos académicos. (shrink)

Many spaces that need to be searched in the sciences are too unwieldy for random search to stand any hope of success. Success instead requires a nonrandom search. But how does one find a nonrandom search that stands a good chance of success? Even to pose the question this way suggests that such nonrandom searches do not magically materialize but need themselves to be discovered by a process of search. The question then naturally arises whether such a “search for a (...) search” is any easier than the original search. This paper establishes a conservation of information theorem according to which the information required to find a successful search is always at least as large as the information required to successfully complete the original search. This result shows that information, like money, obeys strict accounting principles, leaves a trail, and can only originate from a prior information source. (shrink)

Are principles of information processing necessary to demonstrate the consistency of statistical mechanics? Does the physical implementation of a computational operation have a fundamental thermodynamic cost, purely by virtue of its logical properties? These two questions lie at the centre of a large body of literature concerned with the Szilard engine (a variant of the Maxwell's demon thought experiment), Landauer's principle (supposed to embody the fundamental principle of the thermodynamics of computation) and possible connections between the two. A variety (...) of attempts to answer these questions have illustrated many open questions in the foundations of statistical mechanics. (shrink)

Cost conversations are essential to informed consent because patients have a right to information that they think is relevant, and patients overwhelmingly report that cost information is relevant to their medical decisions. Providers have an ethical responsibility to provide necessary information for informed consent, and therefore must discuss costs. The Shared Decision Making model is ideal for enabling this exchange of information, and decision aids are also helpful. Although barriers exist, many useful tools can help (...) providers fulfill this obligation, and encouraging progress is being made to improve cost transparency from insurers and facilities. (shrink)

Background: Omalizumab, an anti-immunoglobulin E antibody, reduces exacerbations and symptoms in uncontrolled allergic asthma. The study objective was to estimate the costs and consequences of omalizumab compared to usual care from a US payer perspective. Methods: We estimated payer costs, quality-adjusted survival (QALYs), and the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of omalizumab compared to usual care using a state-transition simulation model that included sensitivity analyses. Every 2 weeks, patients could transition between chronic asthma and exacerbation health states. The best (...) available evidence informed the clinical and cost input estimates. Five years of omalizumab treatment followed by usual care was assumed to estimate a lifetime horizon. Omalizumab responders (60.5% of treated) were modeled as a separate scenario where nonresponders reverted back to usual care after 16 weeks of active treatment. Results: The mean lifetime discounted costs and QALYs were $83 400 and 13.87 for usual care and $174 500 and 14.19 for omalizumab plus usual care resulting in $287 200/QALY (95% interval: $219 300, $557 900). The ICER was $172 300/QALY when comparing omalizumab to usual care in the responder scenario. One-way sensitivity analyses indicated that the results were sensitive to the difference in treatment-specific utilities for the chronic state, exacerbation-associated mortality, omalizumab price, exacerbation rates, and response definition. Conclusions: The results suggest that adding omalizumab to usual care improves QALYs at an increase in direct medical costs. The cost-effectiveness of omalizumab is similar to other chronic disease biologics. The value increases when omalizumab response is used to guide long-term treatment. (shrink)

A cost analysis of the utilization of new expensive vascular grafts is performed, applying the methodology of decision analysis to the theoretical case of a sixty year old male patient undergoing femoropopliteal grafting for limb threatening ischemia. The problem is presented graphically as a decision tree, uncertainties are quantified in terms of probabilities and end outcomes are evaluated in monetary terms. This informations is then utilized to calculate cost values associated with alternative actions.Based on initial cumulative patency figures of the (...) new more expensive grafts and the known performance of the older grafts, the initial high expense for the new grafts is justified economically, if the saphenous vein is not available. This analysis, apart from giving an answer to a specific clinical problem, can be viewed as a general model for cost analysis of surgical procedures. (shrink)

Whistleblowers are a vital means of protecting society because they provide information about serious wrongdoing. And yet, people who speak up can suffer. Even so, debates on whistleblowing focus on compelling employees to come forward, often overlooking the risk involved. Theoretical understanding of whistleblowers’ post-disclosure experience is weak because tangible and material impacts are poorly understood due partly to a lack of empirical detail on the financial costs of speaking out. To address this, we present findings from a (...) novel empirical study surveying whistleblowers. We demonstrate how whistleblowers who leave their role as a result of speaking out can lose both the financial and temporal resources necessary to redevelop their livelihoods post-disclosure. We also show how associated costs involving significant legal and health expenditure can rise. Based on these insights, our first contribution is to present a new conceptual framing of post-disclosure experiences, drawing on feminist theory, that emphasizes the bodily vulnerability of whistleblowers and their families. Our second contribution repositions whistleblowing as a form of labour defending against precarity, which involves new expenses, takes significant time, and often must be carried out with depleted income. Bringing forth the intersubjective aspect of the whistleblowing experience, our study shows how both the post-disclosure survival of whistleblowers, and their capacity to speak, depend on institutional supports or, in their absence, on personal networks. By reconceptualizing post-disclosure experiences in this way—as material, embodied and intersubjective—practical implications for whistleblower advocacy and policy emerge, alongside contributions to theoretical debates. Reversing typical formulations in business ethics, we turn extant debates on the ethical duty of employees to speak up against wrongdoing on their heads. We argue instead for a responsibility to protect whistleblowers exposed to vulnerability, a duty owed by those upon whose behalf they speak. (shrink)

This paper conducts a cost–benefit analysis of Australia’s Covid-19 lockdown strategy relative to pursuit of a mitigation strategy in March 2020. The estimated additional deaths from a mitigation strategy are 11,500 to 40,000, implying a Cost per Quality Adjusted Life Year saved by locking down of at least 11 times the generally employed figure of $100,000 for health interventions in Australia. The lockdowns do not then seem to have been justified by reference to the standard benchmark. Consideration of the (...) class='Hi'>information available to the Australian government in March 2020 yields a similar ratio and therefore the same conclusion that lockdown was not warranted. If Australia experiences a new outbreak, and cannot contain it without resort to a nationwide lockdown, the death toll from adopting a mitigation strategy at this point would be even less than had it done so in March 2020, due to the vaccination campaign, lessons learned since March 2020, and because the period over which the virus would then inflict casualties would now be much less than the period from March 2020. This would favour a mitigation policy even more strongly than in March 2020. This approach of assessing the savings in quality adjusted life years and comparing them to a standard benchmark figure ensures that all quality adjusted life years saved by various health interventions are treated equally, which accords with the ethical principle of equity across people. (shrink)

Online music sharing, deemed illegal for invading intellectual property rights under current laws, has become a crucial issue for the music industry in the modern digital age, but few have investigated the potential costs and utilities for individuals involved in such online misbehavior. This study aimed to fill in this gap to predict consumers' intentions to engage in online music sharing and further consider consumers' online music sharing knowledge as a moderator in the research model. The results of repeated (...) measures analysis of variance of costs and utilities of online music sharing not only give more detailed information to grasp empirical implications but also provide some suggestions to the music industry in Taiwan. (shrink)

The new Hungarian Labour Code allows informal payments to be accepted, subject only to the prior permission of the employer. In Hungary, the area most affected is Health Care, where informal payments to medical staff are common. The article assesses the practice on ethical terms, focusing on organisational justice. It includes an analysis of distributional injustice, that is, of non-equitable payments to professionals, on the distribution of payments depending on the specialisation and status of the doctor, on his or her (...) rights to allocate Health Care resources and/or on how assertive he or she is. We show, by means of a content analysis of internet postings and of interviews with physicians, the feelings and attitudes of both patients and doctors—thus enabling us to trace interactional and procedural injustice and portray the main driving forces of informal payment with causal loops. We use a new approach (a system dynamics computer simulation) to demonstrate how informal payments influence therapy procedures. The example of treating the common skin disease of psoriasis examines the specific behaviour of doctors in their everyday practice and estimates the extent to which the prescription of unnecessary or more expensive therapy increases the costs. With this multi-method approach, we demonstrate that the legislation allowing informal payment represents bad ethics, since it enforces organisational injustice, creates mistrust between physicians and patients, decreases performance and increases the total costs paid both by society and the Health Insurance Fund. Informal payments distort the allocation of resources, enforce discrimination based solely on money, violate the concept of solidarity and limit Human Rights in terms of health. (shrink)

Human capital and ICT have a significant role in determining human development. The impacts of ICT and human capital on green growth and environmental sustainability should be explored for sustainable economic development. This research contributes to the literature on the role of ICTs and human capital in the determination of green growth and environmental performance. Based on time-series data 1990–2019, the study intends to investigate the impact of ICTs and human capital on environmental and green growth performance for China. The (...) study reports that ICTs tend to reduce CO2 emissions and improve green growth in the long-run. However, education reduces CO2 emissions in the long-run but does not produce any significant impact on green growth in the long-run. It is suggested that government should invest in environmental efficiency and environmental technologies simultaneously with human capital that could significantly contribute to pollution reduction. Lastly, policies to increase human capital should be implemented simultaneously with policies to promote ICTs contribution in order to confirm green growth and environmental protection. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie qualitative Interviewstudie analysiert informelle Wissensstrukturen von Pflegenden und Ärzten hinsichtlich der beiden Einflussfaktoren „Alter“ und „Kosten“ auf Therapieentscheide am Lebensende als Grundlage ethischer Meinungsbildung. Als Auswertungsmaterial dienen spontane Aussagen zu „Alter“ und „Kosten“, die nicht im Kontext von Fragestellungen zu Ageism oder Rationierung erhoben wurden. Diese Aussagen wurden einer Inhaltsanalyse unterzogen, und zwar anhand von qualitativen und quantitativen Analyseschritten.Die Studie zeigt, dass der Faktor „Alter“ wesentlich häufiger als Einflussfaktor auf Therapieentscheide am Lebensende genannt wird als der Faktor „Kosten“. Zudem (...) gibt es Hinweise auf mögliche Ungleichbehandlung sowie auf Überversorgung von Patienten am Lebensende. Die Befunde stützen die Annahme, dass Therapieentscheidungen eher auf informellen, nicht-institutionalisierten Prozessen beruhen. Eine stärker explizite Strukturierung des Prozesses zur Therapieentscheidung könnte die Risiken von Ungleichbehandlung und Überversorgung reduzieren und dadurch zu ethisch besser vertretbaren Ergebnisse führen. (shrink)

The handicap principle stipulates that signal reliability can be maintained if signals are costly to produce. Yet empirical biologists are typically unable to directly measure evolutionary costs, and instead appeal to expenditure as a sensible proxy. However the link between expenditure and cost is not always as straightforward as proponents of HP assume. We consider signaling interactions where whether the expenditure associated with signaling is converted into an evolutionary cost is in some sense dependent on the behavior of the (...) intended recipient of the signal. We illustrate this with a few empirical examples and demonstrate that on this alternative expenditure to cost mapping the traditional predictions of HP no longer hold. Instead of full information transfer, a partially informative communication system like those uncovered by Wagner :163–181, 2013) and Zollman et al. is possible. (shrink)

We describe the informed consent procedures in a research clinic in Santiago, Chile, and a qualitative study that evaluated these procedures. The recruitment process involves information, counseling and screening of volunteers, and three or four visits to the clinic. The study explored the decision‐making process of women participating in contraceptive trials through 36 interviews. Women understood the research as experimentation or progress. The decision to participate was facilitated by the information provided; time to consider it and to discuss (...) it with partners or relatives; and perceived benefits such as quality of care, non‐cost provision of methods and medical care. For some women, participation was an opportunity to express altruism. The main obstacles for participation were perceived side effects or risks. The final risk‐benefit balance was strongly influenced by women’s needs. Women perceived that the consent form benefited the clinic, proving that participants had made a free decision, and benefited the volunteers by warranting their right to free medical care. The most important problem detected was occasional misunderstanding of the information given on the form. We concluded that a full decision‐making process enhances women’s ability to exercise their right to choose, and assures research institutions that trials are conducted without coercion and that the participants are committed to the study. Researchers have the responsibility of conducting this process. (shrink)

Stakeholder scholars have long explored how stakeholder relationships differ from economic transactions. We contribute to this ongoing inquiry by developing a conceptual framework of relationality in stakeholder theory that encompasses a stakeholder-theoretic extension of Williamson's contracting schema and a new typology of stakeholder relationships. Premised on understanding relationality as the need for informal human relationships beyond formal governance, our framework locates the key difference between transaction cost economics and stakeholder theory in their treatment of informal relationships. While transaction cost economics (...) perceives informal relationships to be shaped by formal governance structures and enforced by contractual safeguards, stakeholder theory is open to the possibility that some informal relationships between stakeholders may be genuinely moral and thus irreducible to formal governance and contractual safeguards. These stakeholder relationships may lead to unique economic effects described by instrumental stakeholder theory. The difference that we identified between the two literatures shows how stakeholder theory's embrace of relationality surpasses that of transaction cost economics. (shrink)

This article presents two related challenges to the idea that, to ensure policy evaluation is comprehensive, all costs and benefits should be aggregated into a single, equity-weighted wellbeing metric. The first is to point out how, even allowing for equity-weighting, the use of a single metric limits the extent to which we can take distributional concerns into account. The second challenge starts from the observation that in this and many other ways, aggregating diverse effects into a single metric of (...) evaluation necessarily involves settling many moral questions that reasonable people disagree about. This raises serious questions as to what role such a method of policy evaluation can and should play in informing policy-making in liberal democracies. Ultimately, to ensure comprehensiveness of policy evaluation in a wider sense, namely, that all the diverse effects that reasonable people might think matter are kept score of, we need multiple metrics as inputs to public deliberation. (shrink)

The sunk cost cognitive bias, or sunk cost fallacy, is a human tendency to continue with: an investment, make a decision, business, couple or project based on the resources that have been invested, instead of making a current evaluation of the results. future benefits and costs. The objective of the research was to analyze the impact of sunk cost cognitive bias on customer decisions and its application in neuromarketing strategies. The specific objectives were: (i) Evaluate how sunk cost influences (...) the perception of the value of products or services. (ii) Identify marketing strategies that exploit the sunk cost bias. (iii) Propose strategies to apply the sunk cost bias in marketing. The results show that the sunk cost bias significantly influences the perception of the value of products and services, affecting purchasing decisions, depending on the educational level, gender, and income level that influence the continuity in the use of products and services. due to previous investment of time or money; When purchasing expensive items customers feel obligated to continue using paid more even if it is not useful and used in full. The continuity in prepaid subscriptions, the perception of discounts for large quantities as a way to make better use of money, the probability of participating in loyalty programs for the accumulated rewards, the preference for payments and flexible cancellation, create a valuable perception of products they have previously invested in, the preference for repairing expensive items, and the perception of loss from a previous investment. It is concluded that the sunk cost cognitive bias significantly influences the decisions and behavior of a vast majority of customers, and how companies can use this information to design effective marketing campaigns. (shrink)

Language is an imperfect and coarse means of communicating information about a complex and nuanced world. We report on an experiment designed to capture this feature of communication. The messages available to the sender imperfectly describe the state of the world; however, the sender can improve communication, at a cost, by increasing the complexity or elaborateness of the message. Here the sender learns the state of the world, then sends a message to the receiver. The receiver observes the message (...) and provides a best guess about the state. The incentives of the players are aligned in the sense that both sender and receiver are paid an amount which is increasing in the accuracy of the receiver’s guess. We find that the size of the language endogenously emerges as a function of the costs of communication. Specifically, we find that higher communication costs are associated with a smaller language. Although the equilibrium predictions do not perform well, this divergence occurs in a manner which is consistent with the experimental communication literature: overcommunication. We find that the sender’s payoffs, relative to equilibrium payoffs, are decreasing in the cost of communication. We also find that the receiver’s payoffs, relative to equilibrium payoffs, are increasing in the cost of communication. Finally, we find imperfections in coordination on the basis of the experimental labels. (shrink)