Irrational Option Exclusion

commentary on: effectiveness of confidential unit exclusion option in blood transfusion services needs re-evaluation

Irrational healers?

But there must be some further rules shaping the dynamics of prescribing than these heuristics, or alternately some of those listed must be capable of more than 1 application. Consider the dynamics of prescribing within the pediatric mental health field. Over the course of 25 years, the prescribing of stimulants to children has grown exponentially – primarily in North America. In this case, cli...

Irrational principals

Timothy Besley’s Principled Agents? carefully surveys the modern social science literature on political agency problems and tries to chart a sensible middle course between the naive assumption that politicians maximize the public welfare and the pessimism of Virginia-style public choice. However, the literature that Besley showcases is seriously flawed. By building on the empirically discredite...

Irrational Life

The Game of Life, invented by John Horton Conway over 30 years ago, is probably the best known cellular automaton. An infinite rectangular grid divides the plane into squares called cells. Each cell can be dead or alive, but at any given moment only finitely many cells are alive. Each cell has eight neighbors. The evolution in (discrete) time follows simple rules: if at the moment n a cell is a...

Irrational Privacy?

The purpose of this symposium is to consider the implications of important recent work at the intersection of behavioral economics and information privacy. There is much to celebrate in this work, which has improved our understanding of the ways that markets in personal information actually function. Yet behavioral economic analysis has done little to defuse the most intractable problem that em...