Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Improving the design and implementation of evidence-based practice depends on successful behaviour change interventions. This requires an appropriate method for characterising interventions and linking them to an analysis of the targeted behaviour. There exists a plethora of frameworks of behaviour change interventions, but it is not clear how well they serve this purpose. This paper evaluates these frameworks, and develops and evaluates a new framework aimed at overcoming their limitations. A systematic search of electronic databases and consultation with behaviour change experts were used to identify frameworks of behaviour change interventions. These were evaluated according to three criteria: comprehensiveness, coherence, and a clear link to an overarching model of behaviour. A new framework was developed to meet these criteria. The reliability with which it could be applied was examined in two domains of behaviour change: tobacco control and obesity. Nineteen frameworks were identified covering nine intervention functions and seven policy categories that could enable those interventions. None of the frameworks reviewed covered the full range of intervention functions or policies, and only a minority met the criteria of coherence or linkage to a model of behaviour. At the centre of a proposed new framework is a 'behaviour system' involving three essential conditions: capability, opportunity, and motivation (what we term the 'COM-B system'). This forms the hub of a 'behaviour change wheel' (BCW) around which are positioned the nine intervention functions aimed at addressing deficits in one or more of these conditions; around this are placed seven categories of policy that could enable those interventions to occur. The BCW was used reliably to characterise interventions within the English Department of Health's 2010 tobacco control strategy and the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence's guidance on reducing obesity. Interventions and policies to change behaviour can be usefully characterised by means of a BCW comprising: a 'behaviour system' at the hub, encircled by intervention functions and then by policy categories. Research is needed to establish how far the BCW can lead to more efficient design of effective interventions.

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The behaviour change wheel: a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions.

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

/pdf/international-norm-dynamics-and-political-change-37ig9r9dlq.pdf

International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfield of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.

Risk as Feelings

Early studies of intuitive judgment and decision making conducted with the late Amos Tversky are reviewed in the context of two related concepts: an analysis of accessibility, the ease with which thoughts come to mind; a distinction between effortless intuition and deliberate reasoning. Intuitive thoughts, like percepts, are highly accessible. Determinants and consequences of accessibility help explain the central results of prospect theory, framing effects, the heuristic process of attribute substitution, and the characteristic biases that result from the substitution of nonextensional for extensional attributes. Variations in the accessibility of rules explain the occasional corrections of intuitive judgments. The study of biases is compatible with a view of intuitive thinking and decision making as generally skilled and successful.

https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/JudgementAndChoice.MappingBoundedRationality.DKahneman2003.pdf

A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality.

The last decade has witnessed the birth of the New Legal Realism—an effort to go beyond the old realism by testing competing hypotheses about the role of law and politics in judicial decisions, with reference to large sets and statistical analysis. The New Legal Realists have uncovered a Standard Model of Judicial Behavior, demonstrating significant differences between Republican appointees and Democratic appointees, and showing that such differences can be diminished or heightened by panel composition. The New Legal Realists have also started to find that race, sex, and other demographic characteristics sometimes have effects on judicial judgments. At the same time, many gaps remain. Numerous areas of law remain unstudied; certain characteristics of judges have yet to be investigated; and in some ways, the existing work is theoretically thin. The New Legal Realism has clear jurisprudential implications, bearing as it does on competing accounts of legal reasoning, including Ronald Dworkin’s suggestion that such reasoning is a search for “integrity.” Discussion is devoted to the relationship between the New Legal Realism and some of the perennial normative questions in administrative law. In 1931, Karl Llewellyn attempted to capture the empirical goals of the legal realists by referring to early “efforts to capitalize the wealth of our reported cases to make large-scale quantitative studies of facts and outcome.” Llewellyn emphasized the “hope that these might develop lines of prediction more sure, or at least capable of adding further certainty to the predictions based as hitherto on intensive study of smaller bodies of cases.” But Llewellyn added, with apparent embarrassment: “I know of no published results.” We are in the midst of a flowering of “large-scale quantitative studies of facts and outcome,” with numerous published results. The relevant studies have produced a New Legal Realism—an effort to understand the sources of judicial decisions on the basis of ∗ Assistant Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School. ** Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, Law School and Department of Political Science, University of Chicago. We are grateful to the Chicago Judges Project, and in particular to Dean Saul Levmore, for relevant support. 1 Karl N. Llewellyn, Some Realism About Realism: Responding to Dean Pound, 44 Harv L Rev 1222, 1243-44 (1931). 2 Id. at 1244. 3 Id.

/pdf/the-new-legal-realism-4gnbzl4xuf.pdf

The New Legal Realism

Human Agency and Behavioral Economics

Excessive borrowing, no less than insufficient savings, might be a product of bounded rationality. Identifiable psychological mechanisms are likely to contribute to excessive borrowing; these include myopia, procrastination, optimism bias, “miswanting,” and what might be called cumulative cost neglect. Suppose that excessive borrowing is a significant problem for some or many; if so, how might the law respond? The first option involves weak paternalism, through debiasing and other strategies that leave people free to choose as they wish. Another option is strong paternalism, which forecloses choice. Because of private heterogeneity and the risk of government error, regulators should have a firm presumption against strong paternalism, and hence the initial line of defense against excessive borrowing consists of information campaigns, debiasing, and default rules. On imaginable empirical findings, however, there may be a plausible argument for strong paternalism in the form of restrictions on various practices, perhaps including “teaser rates” and late fees. The two larger themes, applicable in many contexts, involve the importance of an ex post perspective on the consequences of consumer choices and the virtues and limits of weak forms of paternalism, including debiasing and libertarian paternalism.

/pdf/boundedly-rational-borrowing-58pzvext3g.pdf

Boundedly Rational Borrowing

Democracy and Shifting Preferences

Administrative regulations and tort law both impose controls on activities that cause mortality risks, but they do so in puzzlingly different ways. Under a relatively new and still-controversial procedure, administrative regulations rely on a fixed value of a statistical life representing the hedonic loss from death. Under much older law, tort law in most states excludes hedonic loss from the calculation of damages, and instead focuses on loss of income, which regulatory policy ignores. Regulatory policy also disregards losses to dependents; tort law usually allows dependents to recover for loss of support. Regulatory policy generally treats the loss of the life of a child as equivalent to the loss of the life of an adult; tort law usually treats the loss of the life of a child as less valuable. Regulatory policy implicitly values foreigners as equal to Americans; tort law does not. We argue that both areas of law make serious mistakes in valuing life and that each should learn from the other. Regulatory policy properly focuses on hedonic loss from death, and tort law should adopt this approach. But regulatory policy should imitate tort law’s individualized approach to valuing the loss from death, including its inclusion of losses to dependents. If these changes were made, tort awards would be more uniform and predictable, and regulations would be less uniform and more stringent. In addition, average tort damages for wrongful death would be at least twice as high as they are today. With respect to dollar judgments for mortality risks, a pervasive issue is how to combine accuracy with administrability and predictability; both bodies of law could do far better on this score. How should the legal system assign dollar values to human lives? Consider a highly publicized example. On September 22, 2001, Congress enacted legislation to compensate the survivors of the attacks of eleven days earlier. Under the final regulations, survivors were permitted to claim amounts for both economic and non-economic losses. The economic losses were to be measured by calculating each victim’s expected lost wages from 5, 2004 * Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School. ** Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Chicago, Law School and Department of Political Science. Thanks to Matthew Adler, Ward Farnsworth, Robert Hahn, Saul Levmore, Richard Posner, Adrian Vermeule, and W. Kip Viscusi for comments, and to Nikkie Eitmann, Josh Kluewer, Wayne Hsiung, Gavin Martinson, and Andres Sawicki for research assistance. Posner thanks the Russell Baker Scholars Fund for financial support. 1 Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, § 405(c)1-2, 49 U.S.C § 40401 (2001). 2 See http://www.usdoj.gov/victimcompensation/. For discussion, see Symposium, 53 DePaul L Rev 205 (2003). September 11, 2001 through the anticipated date of retirement, subject to several timate of household consumption or victim. Noneconomic losses were set at $250,000 per victim plus 100,000 per surviving spouse and ild. In all, 2,878 families, about 97 percent of those eligible, received compensation rom the fund, with amo a high of $7.1 million; e average award totaled about $2.1 million per family. Hence there was significant varia presu comm awar varia simu of ru are s bring ust generally accom 7 and to ndertake that analysis, agencies must turn human lives into monetary equivalents. For ple, the Environm a set of fact-specific awards adjustments, including a reduction by an es expenditure by the $ for each surviving ch f unts ranging from a low of $250,000 to th bility among awards. But the variability came amidst a serious effort to produce mptive floors and caps, with a “baseline” for single decedents of $300,000 and a itment to allow awards exceeding $3,000,000 only in unusual circumstances. These ds have been attacked on multiple grounds, including excessive and insufficient bility. The September 11 awards reflect a strong influence from tort law, which they ltaneously modify. But in American law, tort doctrines provide only one of two sets les for monetizing death. The other comes from administrative regulations, and there triking contrasts between the two bodies of law. One of our main goals here is to the two in contact with one another. Countless regulations now attempt to reduce statistical risks. Cost-benefit analysis pany these regulations, at least if their costs are high, m u exam ental Protection Agency values each life at a uniform number, most recently $6 million. Through tort law, courts provide 3 28 C.F.R. § 104.44 (2004). 4 See David W. Chen, After Weighing Value of Lives, 9/11 Fund Completes Its Task, The New York Times, June 16, 2004, at A1. 5 66 Fed Reg 66,274-75. 6 See Alina Tugend, Lives in the Balance, The National Journal Government Executive, September 2003, at 50; David W. Chen, Man Behind Sept. 11 Fund Describes Effort as a Success, With Reservations, The ee 68 Fed. Reg. 41434, 41488 (July 11, 2003); in its ggested a ). New York Times, January 1, 2004, at B3. 7 See Stephen Breyer et al., Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy 120-35 (5 ed. 2002). 8 A general overview can be found in Office of Management and Budget, Regulatory Analysis, Circular A4 (September 17, 2003), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg/regpol.html#rr 9 See 66 Fed. Reg. at 7012. In its July 2003 regulation governing food labeling of trans fatty acids, the Food and Drug Administration used a VSL of $6.5 million, s March 13, 2003 proposed rule on dietary ingredients and dietary supplements, the same agency su VSL of $5 million, see 68 Fed. Reg. 12158, 12229 (using this value to calculate the “value of a statistical life day”

Cass R. Sunstein

Papers

The New Legal Realism

Human Agency and Behavioral Economics

Boundedly Rational Borrowing

Democracy and Shifting Preferences

Dollars and Death