In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

The author systematically examines one of the important issues of information — establishing the market price. He introduces the concept of «search» — where a buyer wanting to get a better price, is forced to question sellers. The article deals with various aspects of finding the necessary information.

Economics of Information

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

This paper presents the overview of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and their energy, land use, and emissions implications. The SSPs are part of a new scenario framework, established by the climate change research community in order to facilitate the integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation. The pathways were developed over the last years as a joint community effort and describe plausible major global developments that together would lead in the future to different challenges for mitigation and adaptation to climate change. The SSPs are based on five narratives describing alternative socio-economic developments, including sustainable development, regional rivalry, inequality, fossil-fueled development, and middle-of-the-road development. The long-term demographic and economic projections of the SSPs depict a wide uncertainty range consistent with the scenario literature. A multi-model approach was used for the elaboration of the energy, land-use and the emissions trajectories of SSP-based scenarios. The baseline scenarios lead to global energy consumption of 400–1200 EJ in 2100, and feature vastly different land-use dynamics, ranging from a possible reduction in cropland area up to a massive expansion by more than 700 million hectares by 2100. The associated annual CO 2 emissions of the baseline scenarios range from about 25 GtCO 2 to more than 120 GtCO 2 per year by 2100. With respect to mitigation, we find that associated costs strongly depend on three factors: (1) the policy assumptions, (2) the socio-economic narrative, and (3) the stringency of the target. The carbon price for reaching the target of 2.6 W/m 2 that is consistent with a temperature change limit of 2 °C, differs in our analysis thus by about a factor of three across the SSP marker scenarios. Moreover, many models could not reach this target from the SSPs with high mitigation challenges. While the SSPs were designed to represent different mitigation and adaptation challenges, the resulting narratives and quantifications span a wide range of different futures broadly representative of the current literature. This allows their subsequent use and development in new assessments and research projects. Critical next steps for the community scenario process will, among others, involve regional and sectoral extensions, further elaboration of the adaptation and impacts dimension, as well as employing the SSP scenarios with the new generation of earth system models as part of the 6th climate model intercomparison project (CMIP6).

/pdf/the-shared-socioeconomic-pathways-and-their-energy-land-use-atxud52ccd.pdf

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their energy, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: An overview

AUTHOR Leventhal, Gerald S TITLE What Should Be Done with Equity Theory? New Approaches to the Study of Fairness in Social Relationships SPONS AGENCY National Science Foundation, Washington, DC PUB DATE Sep 76 GRANT GS-3171 NOTE 52p;,To appear as a chapter in Gezgen, KO, Ed, And Others, "Social Exchange Theory," John Wiley, 1977 AVAILABLE FROM Dr Gerald S Leventhal, Department of Psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan 48202 (free)

/pdf/what-should-be-done-with-equity-theory-new-approaches-to-the-57k7iropom.pdf

What Should Be Done with Equity Theory? New Approaches to the Study of Fairness in Social Relationships.

When "Agendas and Instability in American Politics" appeared fifteen years ago, offering a profoundly original account of how policy issues rise and fall on the national agenda, the "Journal of Politics" predicted that it would 'become a landmark study of public policy making and American politics'. That prediction proved true, and in this long-awaited second edition, Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones refine their influential argument and expand it to illuminate the workings of democracies beyond the United States. The authors retain all the substance of their contention that short-term, single-issue analysis cast public policy too narrowly as the result of cozy and dependable arrangements among politicians, interest groups, and the media. Baumgartner and Jones provide a different interpretation by taking the long view of several issues - including nuclear energy, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety - to demonstrate that bursts of rapid, unpredictable policy change punctuate the patterns of stability more frequently associated with government. Featuring a new introduction and two additional chapters, this updated edition ensures that their findings will remain a touchstone of policy studies for many years to come.

Agendas and instability in American politics

Rapid change in public policy outcomes often occurs, but most theories of pluralism emphasize only incrementalism. Yet from a historical view, it can easily be seen that many policies go through lo...

/pdf/agenda-dynamics-and-policy-subsystems-12198vqyck.pdf

Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems

On any given day, policymakers are required to address a multitude of problems and make decisions about a variety of issues, from the economy and education to health care and defense. This has been true for years, but until now no studies have been conducted on how politicians manage the flood of information from a wide range of sources. How do they interpret and respond to such inundation? Which issues do they pay attention to and why? Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner answer these questions on decision-making processes and prioritization in "The Politics of Attention". Analyzing fifty years of data, Jones and Baumgartner's book is the first study of American politics based on a new information-processing perspective. The authors bring together the allocation of attention and the operation of governing institutions into a single model that traces public policies, public and media attention to them, and governmental decisions across multiple institutions. "The Politics of Attention offers a groundbreaking approach to American politics based on the responses of policymakers to the flow of information. It asks how the system solves, or fails to solve, problems rather than looking to how individual preferences are realized through political action.

The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems

Punctuated-equilibrium theory seeks to explain a simple observation: political processes are generally characterized by stability and incrementalism, but occasionally they produce large-scale departures. Punctuated-equilibrium theory extends these observations by placing the policy process on a dual foundation of political institutions and boundedly rational decisionmaking. It emphasizes two related elements of the policy process: issue definition and agenda setting. The chapter examines punctuated-equilibrium theory and its foundations in the longitudinal study of political institutions and in political decisionmaking. It provides the punctuated-equilibrium theory to national budgeting and provide some recent evidence of punctuations and equilibria in US national government spending since World War II. The chapter shows how the theory has been generalized, including extensions to policymaking in US state and local governments as well as European national governments. It concludes with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to understanding public policymaking.

Punctuated-Equilibrium Theory : Explaining Stability and Change in Public Policymaking

The projected size and spatial distribution of the future population are important drivers of global change and key determinants of exposure and vulnerability to hazards. Spatial demographic projections are widely used as inputs to spatial projections of land use, energy use, and emissions, as well as to assessments of the impacts of extreme events, sea level rise, and other climate-related outcomes. To date, however, there are very few global-scale, spatially explicit population projections, and those that do exist are often based on simple scaling or trend extrapolation. Here we present a new set of global, spatially explicit population scenarios that are consistent with the new Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) developed to facilitate global change research. We use a parameterized gravity-based downscaling model to produce projections of spatial population change that are quantitatively consistent with national population and urbanization projections for the SSPs and qualitatively consistent with assumptions in the SSP narratives regarding spatial development patterns. We show that the five SSPs lead to substantially different spatial population outcomes at the continental, national, and sub-national scale. In general, grid cell-level outcomes are most influenced by national-level population change, second by urbanization rate, and third by assumptions about the spatial style of development. However, the relative importance of these factors is a function of the magnitude of the projected change in total population and urbanization for each country and across SSPs. We also demonstrate variation in outcomes considering the example of population existing in a low-elevation coastal zone under alternative scenarios.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/8/084003/pdf

Bryan D. Jones

Papers

Agendas and instability in American politics

Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems

The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems

Punctuated-Equilibrium Theory : Explaining Stability and Change in Public Policymaking

Spatially explicit global population scenarios consistent with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways