How individuals choose health insurance: An experimental analysis

An individual choosing a health insurance policy faces a complex decision environment where a large set of alternatives differ on a variety of dimensions. There is uncertainty and the choice is repeated at least once a year. We study decisions and decision strategies in a laboratory experiment where we create a controlled environment that closely mirrors this setting. We use an electronic information board that allows to carefully monitor the individual's decision strategy. The number of alternatives, switching costs, and the speed at which health deteriorates are varied across treatments. We find that most subjects' search is based more on attributes than on policies. Moreover, we find that an increase in the number of alternatives increases decision-making time; makes subjects consider a lower fraction of the available information; makes it more likely that subjects will switch; and decreases the quality of their decisions. The introduction of positive costs of switching makes people switch less often but improves the quality of their decisions. Finally, if health deteriorates only gradually, individuals tend to stick to their current policy too long.     

Informational and Monetary Lobbying: Expert Politicians,Good Decisions?

This paper finds that the strategic interaction between opposing interest groups depends on the decision maker's expertise. If the costs to provide information are sufficiently low, then the decision quality is nonmonotonic in the politician's expertise. An expert may attract less informational lobbying and make worse decisions than a politician who is ex ante endowed with less information and therefore less predisposed to a particular policy.     

GROUP DECISION MAKING WITH UNCERTAIN OUTCOMES: UNPACKING CHILD–PARENT CHOICE OF THE HIGH SCHOOL TRACK

Predicting group decisions under uncertainty requires disentangling individual members' utilities over the consequences of choice, their expectations for uncertain outcomes, and their choice process as a group. I estimate simple Bayesian models of child–parent choice of high school track with subjective risk and unilateral or bilateral, nonstrategic decisions, by combining families' actual choices with novel survey information about children's and parents' subjective probabilities over choice consequences, their individually preferred choices, and their decision roles. A set of policy counterfactuals confirms the importance of introducing the beliefs and decision roles of individual members in models and policy analysis of group decisions.     

IS THE VIEW FROM THE EUROTOWER PURELY EUROPEAN? – NATIONAL DIVERGENCE AND ECB INTEREST RATE POLICY

The official view on ECB monetary policy claims that decisions are based on euro zone data and that diverging regional developments are disregarded. To test empirically whether regional developments have an impact on ECB decisions we develop a generalised monetary policy reaction function which allows for an influence of regional divergence. Reaction function estimations and a probit model of interest rate decisions for the first years of the euro area offer some first support for an impact of regional divergence. The results clarify that ignoring a potential national perspective may lead to biased estimates for the ECB reaction function.     

The relevance of irrelevant information

This paper experimentally investigates the effect of introducing unavailable alternatives and irrelevant information regarding the alternatives on the optimality of decisions in choice problems. We find that the presence of unavailable alternatives and irrelevant information generates suboptimal decisions with the interaction between the two amplifying this effect. Irrelevant information in any dimension increases the time costs of decisions. We also identify a “preference for simplicity” beyond the desire to make optimal decisions or minimize time spent on a decision problem.

     

Multi-attribute preference modelling and regional land-use planning

Forest management policy decisions are complex due to the multiple-use nature of goods and services from forests, difficulty in monetary valuation of ecological services and the involvement of a large number of stakeholders. Multi-attribute decision techniques can be used to synthesise stakeholder preferences related to regional forest planning because it can accommodate conflicting, multidimensional, incommensurable and incomparable objectives. The objective of this paper is to examine how the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) can be used to incorporate stakeholder preferences in determining optimal forest land-use choices. The Australian Regional Forest Agreement Programme is taken as an illustrative case for the analysis. The results show that the AHP can formalise public participation in decision making and increase the transparency and the credibility of the process.     

Dynamic adaptive transport policies for handling deep uncertainty

Many long-term transport policy decisions are made by assuming that (1) the range of possible futures is known well enough to predict future changes to the transport system, (2) there is enough knowledge regarding the correct transport system model to estimate policy outcomes, and (3) there is enough knowledge regarding the importance stakeholders currently assign to the various outcomes or will assign in the future. However, for long-term transport policy decisions these assumptions can often not be made, since decision makers, analysts, and experts do not know or cannot agree on (1) how the future will develop, (2) the system models, and/or (3) the value system(s) to be used to rank alternative policies. This paper presents a ‘dynamic adaptive’ approach to policymaking for long-term transport policies that aims at overcoming the shortcomings of traditional approaches for handling deep uncertainty. It allows adaptations in time as knowledge is gathered. The approach is illustrated with dynamic adaptive policies for solving various long-term problems in the fields of road, rail, and air transport.     

Monetary policy committees and interest rate setting

This paper shows that it is preferable for monetary policy to be conducted by a committee instead of a single policy maker if there is uncertainty about potential output. We examine three decision procedures - an optimal procedure, averaging and voting - and find that the latter is the appropriate way to reach decisions if policy makers are not equally skilled. Finally, we demonstrate that efficient decision procedures reduce the persistence of shocks.     

Adverse selection problems without the Spence-Mirrlees condition

This paper studies a class of one-dimensional screening problems where the agent's utility function does not satisfy the Spence-Mirrlees condition (SMC). The strength of the SMC for hidden information problems is to provide a full characterization of implementable contracts using only the local incentive compatibility (IC) constraints. These constraints are equivalent to the monotonicity of the decision variable with respect to the agent's unobservable one-dimensional parameter. When the SMC is violated the local IC constraints are no longer sufficient for implementability and additional (global) IC constraints have to be taken into account. In particular, implementable decisions may not be monotonic and discretely pooled types must have the same marginal utility of the decision (or equivalently, get the same marginal tariff). Moreover, at the optimal decision, the principal must preserve the same trade-off between rent extraction and allocative distortion measured in the agent's marginal rent unit. In a specific setting where non-monotone contracts may be optimal we fully characterize the solution.     

SHORT-RUN MONETARY POLICY AND THE MACROECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT

This study investigates factors influencing monetary policy decisions of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) over the period 1960–1998. Competing perspectives regarding the process of monetary policy making exist, with some researchers contending the FOMC makes short-run policy decisions based solely on "objective" macroeconomic considerations and others arguing that political and other nonmacroeconomic considerations significantly influence monetary policy voting. Empirical studies support both views in varying degrees. This article presents a model of FOMC decision making which posits that (1) the current/prospective macroeconomic environment at the time of FOMC meetings is the most important consideration of monetary policy makers, and (2) nonmacroeconomic variables receive little attention unless macroeconomic conditions are difficult for policy makers to assess. Probit results support the implications of the model.     

Allocation of resources in a team

The informational efficiency of “price” and “demand” messages in a resource allocation mechanism is studied here with the aid of the theory of teams¹. In the usual analysis of adjustment mechanisms (tâtonnement, decomposition), the adjustment process is assumed to run to completion, so that all the allocation and resource decisions can be made on the basis of enough information to guarantee optimal decisions². If, however, decisions must be made before the adjustment process is completed, say, after only a few iterations, then the decisions must be taken with limited information, and thus under conditions of uncertainty. This paper discusses a simple model in an attempt to examine explicitly these problems of uncertainty and limited information. A set of enterprise managers are assumed to produce various commodities, using scarce resources allocated to the enterprises by a resource manager. The enterprise managers also make decisions that affect their individual outputs. Varous kinds of communication among the managers, together with the corresponding information structures, are formulated, including the communication of price and demand messages. Optimal decision rules for the managers are calculated for the objective of maximizing the expected value of an index of total output. (It is assumed that the production functions and the supplies of scarce resources are stochastic, but are observed by the respective managers.) It is shown that optimal decision rules based on a single exchange of price and demand messages, between the resource manager on the one hand and the enterprise managers on the other, produces as good results as rules based on (1) complete information for the resource manager, and (2) information about the supplies of resources on the part of the enterprise managers. Furthermore, these price and demand messages produce approximately fully optimal results when the number of enterprises is large. However, the optimal decisions of the enterprise managers do not maximize profits, at least relative to any price that is the same for all enterprises. An assumption that the production functions are quadratic plays a key role.     

Biodiversity value and the optimal location of forest conservation sites in Southern Finland

Safeguarding biodiversity has been one of the most important issues in environmental and forest policies since the 1990s. In Southern Finland, decisions concerning further actions for the preservation of forest biodiversity will be made in the coming years. To support policy making, we present a multi-regional model that is applicable in determining the economically optimal regional allocation of conservation sites. Three habitat quality models are evaluated to calculate habitat quality indices used as a surrogate for a biodiversity value in a forest sector model. The scenarios presented provide information about the economic impacts of conservation choices on the forest sector. The overall economic impacts of conservation depend on its scale and regional allocation. Conserving land with high biodiversity value can have less adverse impact on the forest sector than conservation of typical commercial forest sites. When optimizing conservation set-asides, we found that set-asides targeted to certain regions possessing higher/lower than average relative share of ecologically valuable land, caused lower/higher adverse economic impacts on the forest sector. Because it is expensive to search land suitable for conservation, these regions could be respectively favoured/avoided when asking forest owners to offer their land for the new conservation program in Southern Finland, which will be based on voluntariness.     

Consumer choice and information : New experimental evidence

Many laws and regulations aimed at safeguarding consumers deal with the amount and kind of product information that consumers receive. Implicit in these regulations is the belief that consumers can make use of the appropriate information, provided only that it is made available. Recently a number of authors have argued that consumer decisionmaking is subject to consistent biases, suggesting poor purchase decisions may result even with access to the relevant information. Indeed some critics have argued that consumers may be subject to information overload so that they may make worse decisions with extra information than without it. The experimental results presented in this paper address some of these issues. The results suggest that untrained people can use simplifying strategies in quite complicated decision problems. Also, while information overload clearly can occur, the subjects in our experiments appeared able to ignore unnecessary or unwanted information.     

Self-Defeating Regional Concentration

Most policy debates on regional policies implicitly assume that there is too much concentration. In our two-region model of migration, desirable concentration fails to occur under some conditions, and undesirable concentration occurs in others. In the latter case, even though the individuals collectively prefer to be distributed evenly across the two regions, they end up concentrating into one region in their pursuit of a better life. Hence, the freedom to move can be self-defeating. We characterize the conditions for such self-defeating concentration to occur. The coordination failures between the entry decision of service firms and the migration decision of individuals are caused by the incompleteness of markets due to the endogeneity of the range of services available, which deprive the agents of the opportunity to signal demand and supply for potential services. The argument does not rely on price distortions, the nonconvexities implied by increasing returns and nontradedness, congestion externalities, nor myopia in migration decisions.     

NONPARAMETRIC MODELS OF FINANCIAL LEVERAGE DECISIONS

This paper applies nonparametric decision tree models to the analysis of financial leverage decisions. This approach presents three appealing features: (i) the relationship between leverage and explanatory variables is not predetermined but is derived from information provided by the data, (ii) the models respect the fractional nature of leverage ratios, and (iii) each covariate is allowed to influence in different ways the financial leverage decisions of firms automatically assigned to different groups. Based on a data set of Portuguese firms, decision trees are used to tackle both classification (the decision to issue debt) and regression (the decision on the amount of debt to be issued, conditional on using debt) problems. It is found that: (i) two‐part models are the most appropriate specification for explaining the overall amount of debt used by firms, (ii) there are no drastic differences between the results produced by tree and parametric models, although some divergences may arise, and (iii) tree models suggest relationships between covariates and leverage that parametric models fail to capture, especially when the sample size is small.     

The necessity of imperfect decisions

I construct a general model which neither postulates decisions are always optimal, nor that decision errors necessarily arise when ‘real world’ agents are involved. Nevertheless, I show that agents always have a positive marginal incentive to use some information imperfectly, but never to use all potential information even if they have costless access to perfect information about how to select every action. These results imply that in order for a decision problem to be internally consistent without simply postulating the extreme limit of perfect decisions, it must explicitly incorporate the effects of both information and decision errors on behavior.     

SOCIAL ACCOUNTING AND THE PUBLIC SECTOR*

This article contributes to the theory of social accounting. As such, it tries to extend earlier literature on the welfare equivalence of the comprehensive net national product in two main directions, both of which refer to the public sector. One is by considering welfare measurement problems associated with public good provision and redistributive policy, respectively, when the public revenues are raised by distortionary taxes. The other is by addressing the consequences of a “federation‐like” decision structure, where independent tax and expenditure decisions are made both by the central government and by lower level governments.     

Collective decisions with interdependent valuations

Many collective decision problems have in common that individuals’ desired outcomes are correlated but not identical. This paper studies collective decisions with private information about desired policies. Each agent holds private information which mainly concerns his own bliss point, but private information also affects all other agents. We concentrate on two specific mechanism, the median and mean mechanisms establish the existence of symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibria of the corresponding games and compare the performance of the mechanisms for different degrees of interdependencies. Applications of our framework include the provision of public goods and the design of decision processes in international organizations.     

Production and Abatement Distortions under Noisy Green Taxes

A pollution regulator seeking to maximize social surplus can be viewed as facing two efficiency problems. One is that, given abatement technology investment decisions, it should attempt to ensure that firms which should produce do produce and firms which should not produce do not produce. This ex-post efficiency problem is not trivial when there is noise concerning the extent of environmental damage a firm does. We use a Bayesian information framework to show that the regulator may find it efficient to tax a firm that reads as a high (low) damage polluter at less (more) than the damage reading. Unfortunately when an abatement decision has to be made, this ex-post efficient tax system also dampens the incentive to abate. In the absence of wrong-firm concerns, a regulator can solve the abatement problem by an ex ante declaration that taxes will not be adjusted for signal noise. However, the regulator has a commitment problem as such taxes may not be ex-post efficient. The most appropriate policy may involve a combination of instruments.