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Basic income is a democratizing reform that is long overdue. A guarantee of basic security is necessary to allow people to stand as more independent. Other institutional adjustments are needed, but basic income will help other policies designed to support human development to be more effective.
We recommend the widespread use of a simple, inexpensive, easy-to-implement, and uniquely powerful tool to improve the transparency and reproducibility of behavioural research — video recordings.
Effort is costly. People devalue personal rewards that require some measure of physical or even mental effort. Laboratory studies now suggest that physical effort is especially costly when engaged to benefit others. Even when people are willing, however, their efforts are often superficial, with people doing what is necessary but no more.
Many countries around the world have serious corruption problems at the expense of public welfare. An experimental economic study now identifies conditions that encourage leaders to accept bribes instead of sanctioning free-riders. Possible anti-corruption strategies can have positive effects, fail or even backfire.
Why does low-quality information go viral? A stylized model of social media predicts that under real-world conditions of high information load and limited attention, low- and high-quality information are equally likely to go viral.
How should Europe allocate asylum seekers? Bansak et al. show that a majority of Europeans support allocating asylum seekers proportionally to each country’s capacity, rather than the current policy of allocation based on country of first entry.
Lockwood et al. use a real-effort task and computational modelling to examine how individuals choose to expend effort when rewards accrue to themselves versus others. They find that people are less motivated to work for others.
Tannenbaum et al. show that partisan framing influences beliefs about the ethical use of behavioural policy interventions, but both US adults and practising policymakers are accepting of nudges when stripped of partisan cues.
Peters et al. use intracranial recordings and machine-learning techniques to show that human subjects under-use decision-incongruent evidence in the brain when computing perceptual confidence.
