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

Country-of-origin (COO) is an increasingly politicized credence attribute in the globalizing food system. While international policy development in this area is geographically far-reaching, the benefits of country-of-origin labels (COOL) to producers and consumers from countries in different locations and levels of economic development are not clear. Previous work investigates the importance of COO to consumers, but is typically limited in scope to consumers in one nation. In addition, little is known about the importance of COO information relative to other credence attributes, especially in non-meat food products. This study measures the benefits of COOL to an internationally diverse set of consumers (in developed and developing countries) and estimates their priority rank in policy development. The paper draws upon research in the management literature suggesting consumer information needs are not based on quality alone, but also relate to affective (emotional) and normative (social acceptance) needs. A conjoint experiment is conducted in China, France, Niger and the United States to elicit consumer preferences for COO information, organic production, and genetic modification. The results indicate COO information is not as important as genetically modified content information (France, the United States, and Niger) or organic production information (China). Findings reveal individuals with quality and food safety information needs place higher importance on genetically modified and organic food information than COO information.

The Relative Importance of Preferences for Country-of-Origin in China, France, Niger and the United States

Predicting future food prices is important not only for projecting and adjusting the cost of government programs but also for business and household planning. This study asks whether unconventional consumer-oriented measures might be useful in the predicting Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Food and Beverages Consumer Price Index (CPI). We investigate the ability of Internet search-based index related to food prices (the Google trends index) and survey-based sentiment indices (the index of consumer sentiment) to predict changes in food-related BLS prices from January 2004 to July 2015. We consider several forecasting models and find that a vector autoregression model (VAR) results in the lowest root mean square error and mean absolute percentage error. We also ask whether our model can out predict USDA Economic Research Service food-related CPI forecasts. Rolling window comparison and encompassing tests are conducted, and we find that our new model including consumer-oriented measures outperforms the USDA model in terms of predictive accuracy.

Predicting Food Prices using Data from Consumer Surveys and Search

A large body of literature suggests individuals behave differently when responding to hypothetical valuation questions than when actual payment is required. Such findings have generated a great deal of skepticism over the use of the contingent valuation method and benefit measures derived from it. Recently, a new method, cheap talk, has been proposed to eliminate the potential bias in hypothetical valuation questions. Cheap talk refers to process of explaining hypothetical bias to individuals prior to asking a valuation question. This study explores the effect of cheap talk in a mass mail survey using a conventional value elicitation technique. Results suggest that cheap talk was effective at reducing willingness-to-pay for most survey participants. However, consistent with previous research, cheap talk did not reduce willingness-to-pay for consumers who were knowledgeable of the good evaluated.

Effects of cheap talk on consumer willingness-to-pay for golden rice

The ability of scientific knowledge to contribute to public debate about societal risks depends on how the public assimilates information resulting from the scientific community. Bayesian decision theory assumes that people update a belief by allocating weights to a prior belief and new information to form a posterior belief. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of prior beliefs on assimilation of scientific information and test several hypotheses about the manner in which people process scientific information on genetically modified food and global warming. Results indicated that assimilation of information is dependent on prior beliefs and that the failure to update beliefs in a Bayesian fashion is a result of several factors including: misinterpreting information, illusionary correlations, selectively scrutinizing information, information-processing problems, knowledge, political affiliation, and cognitive function.

Cognitive Biases in the Assimilation of Scientific Information on Global Warming and Genetically Modified Food

Understanding how farm household consumption responds to adverse income shocks can provide insight into household well-being and appropriate agricultural policy. Using a split-sample survey of Indiana specialty producers, where we randomly assign respondents to treatments that vary the size of a hypothetical income shock, we estimate the relationship between income loss and household consumption. Given that postdisaster producers' risk preferences are important for business decisions, we elicit producers' risk preferences. We find that food and miscellaneous expenses are the most sensitive to income losses. We also find evidence for decreasing absolute risk aversion among producers after the income loss shock.

/pdf/farm-producers-household-consumption-and-individual-risk-52bvx6yhiq.pdf

Jayson L. Lusk

Papers

The Relative Importance of Preferences for Country-of-Origin in China, France, Niger and the United States

Predicting Food Prices using Data from Consumer Surveys and Search

Effects of cheap talk on consumer willingness-to-pay for golden rice

Cognitive Biases in the Assimilation of Scientific Information on Global Warming and Genetically Modified Food

Farm Producers' Household Consumption and Individual Risk Behavior after Natural Disasters