世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

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

The use of non-hypothetical experimental markets for measuring the acceptance of genetically modified foods

The role of beliefs in purchasing process of functional foods

In three separate studies based on data from the Food Demand Survey (FooDS), which has been conducted monthly for over three years, this paper explores heterogeneity in preference across consumers in traditional demand systems, heterogeneity in preferences over time in choice experiments, and the tail of the distribution for a particular food consumption pattern—vegetarianism. Results show that elasticities of demand for food at home and food away from home vary widely across different groups of consumers defined by a priori cluster analysis based on demographic and attitudinal variables. Results from a choice experiment are found to depend on when the experiment was conducted and on the market prices prevailing at the time of the survey. Given the large sample of consumers observed over time, there is sufficient data to demographically characterize a small portion of the population—vegetarians—using traditional logit models and a machine learning method ‐ a classifications tree.

Consumer Research with Big Data: Applications from the Food Demand Survey (FooDS)

Recent advances in plant molecular biology offer a means of reaping the benefits of biotechnology, while potentially assuaging consumer concerns by re-inserting native DNA back into plants. Results are presented from nationwide surveys in the U.S. and France, indicating that more consumers would accept ingenic plants than transgenic plants, with twice as many U.S. than French consumers considering food produced through biotechnology eatable.

Jayson L. Lusk

Papers

The use of non-hypothetical experimental markets for measuring the acceptance of genetically modified foods

The role of beliefs in purchasing process of functional foods

Consumer Research with Big Data: Applications from the Food Demand Survey (FooDS)

Consumer acceptance of ingenic foods.

External validity of a framed field experiment