That collective decisions made through voting may lead to some weird consequences is something probably well known since the first time one tribe started to use some kind of voting in order to reach an agreement. Contrarily to what happens in many other areas of human wisdom, we don’t have any deep reflections on the […]
The cryptocurrency bitcoin now uses up more electricity a year than the whole of Argentina, according to recent estimates from the University of Cambridge. That’s because the creation of a bitcoin, in a process called mining, is achieved by powerful computers that work night and day to decode and solve complex mathematical problems. The energy […]
Participatory budgeting seeks to involve some form of public deliberation in the budget allocation of a city or town. The first process took place in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in the late eighties. Since then the practice spread through the world, with more than 7,000 processes around the world in 2018. The logic underpinning participatory budgeting […]
2020 marks exactly half a century from the publication of one of the most important papers in the crossing of economics, philosophy, and political science (and, taking into account that it barely contained six skimpy pages, probably one of the most influential papers per page ever): Amartya Sen’s “The impossibility of a Paretian liberal”. It […]
In a recent entry, I provided a summary of Brian Caplan’s views (in his book The Case against Education ) about the main evils of our contemporary education system. In a nutshell, the main problem is, in the first place, that most of what is taught in schools and colleges is basically not learnt, or […]
Tides are more predictable than winds or sunshine. Then, why are not they already widely used as a source of renewable energy? The simple answer is that designing and building an ocean energy array is quite complex. This complexity has an associated variability in the cost of energy that makes projects difficult to evaluate from […]
It’s a pitty that Bryan Caplan’s extremely interesting book The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money , published in 2018, has not deserved more careful attention in the public and permanent debate over education (see here an early review in Spanish by Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias). I […]
Strategic decision is the object of study for Game Theory, a discipline that started officially with the book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern . For non-cooperative games, i.e., games in which individuals make decisions individually and with no strings attached, the book was restricted to zero-sum […]
Here, I summarize the discussion on the normative differences between nudges and boosts presented in Sims and Müller, 2019 . Behavioral Economics studies the systematic biases in economic decisions that occur because our cognitive processes are constrained and, thus, context-neutral optimization is impracticable. This area of research started with Tversky and Kahneman (1974) , and […]
Given the choice between €500 and a chance to win either €0 or €1000 with equal probabilities, most people opt for the sure prize of €500, even if the expected amount of money is the same in both cases. In both Economics and Decision Theory, this risk-aversion is usually modeled by considering, not the amount […]