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I sometimes get asked why economists spend so much time thinking about incentives in situations which the government regulates anyway. Why do we care about what firms want to do when there’s only one course of action legally available to them? Here’s one reason why we care: the economy might operate in a far more […]
Well, we don’t run a requests service, but never let it be said that we don’t try to give our readers what they want (or what we want them to want, anyway). The Standard asks us to have a chat about this piece in The Economist which discusses endowment effects, so here goes. The first […]
I’ve talked a lot before about hyperbolic discounting, time inconsistency and smoking. Reading a paper by Gruber and Koszegi on the topic yesterday, I came across an interesting little aside. They point out that, for an addict, smoking in different periods is complementary. That means that taxes to overcome time inconsistency problems are substitutes: if […]
An excellent, and often forgotten, point in favour of limiting our response to climate change is the opportunity cost of reducing carbon emissions. Opponents of a policy response often point to the monetary cost to the developed world. Proponents reply that you can’t put a monetary cost on saving the planet. As economists we should […]
I went to a debate about climate change a few days ago and, uncharacteristically, decided to take notes of my thoughts throughout the talk. In order that they not be wasted I’ve decided to do a series of posts on some of the interesting points that came up in the course of the seminar. Today’s […]
It is well known that the default option for a choice hugely influences the outcome of peoples’ decisions. Governments exploit this regularly by, for instance, using opt-out rather than opt-in schemes for pension plans. The idea here is to encourage people to choose the ‘right’ thing without actually constraining their decisions making in any way. […]