Varieties of paternalism and the heterogeneity of utility structures

A principal source of interest in behavioral economics has been its advertised contributions to policies aimed at ‘nudging’ people away from allegedly natural but self-defeating behavior toward patterns of response thought more likely to improve their welfare. This has occasioned controversies among economists and philosophers around the normative limits of paternalism, especially by technical policy advisors. One recent suggestion has been that ‘boosting,’ in which interventions aim to enhance people’s general cognitive skills and representational repertoires instead of manipulating their choice environments behind their backs, avoids the main normative challenges. A limitation in most of this literature is that it has focused on relatively sweeping policy recommendations and consequently on strong polar alternatives of general paternalism and strict laissez faire. We review a real instance, drawn from a consulting project we conducted for an investment bank, of a proposed intervention that is more typical of the kind that economists are more often actually called upon to offer. In this example, the sophistication of current tools for preference attribution, combined with philosophical externalism about the semantics of preferences that makes it less plausible to attribute their literal self-conscious representation to people as propositional attitude content becomes more tightly refined, blocks applicability of the distinction between nudging and boosting. This seems to call for irreducible, context-specific ethical judgment in assessing the appropriateness of the forms of paternalism that economists must actually wrestle with in going about their everyday business.     

An innovation to improve health outcomes in Amajuba district,KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

Systems’ thinking places high value on understanding the context. This study focused on the collection of disaggregated data in order to understand the context, to facilitate improvement of health outcomes. The aim of this article was to assess the implementation of municipal ward-based health data collection (disaggregated data) and health care workers’ perceptions of this data collection process. This cross-sectional study used mixed methods in Amajuba district. The participants were professional nurses at the Primary Health Care level. Of the 131 respondents, 123 (93.9%) collected municipal ward-based health data, and found it useful. Opportunities for improving data collection were identified. Disaggregation of the data at ward level contributes to a better understanding of the target population’s health, assists planning for health needs and enables provision of targeted interventions in order to improve health outcomes, to prevent financial regression and waste of health resources.     

Muddling through cybersecurity: Insights from the U.S. healthcare industry

The U.S. healthcare sector is inadequately prepared to deal with the reality of cyber threats. The increasing use of smart medical equipment and mobile devices is making healthcare organizations more susceptible to ransomware and other types of malware. The size and complexity of operations, coupled with the presence of numerous legacy and incompatible systems, make it difficult to implement effective cybersecurity measures. The daunting nature of the problem often results in an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it stance among senior healthcare leaders. The preponderance of healthcare-related laws, compliance regulations, and security guidance frameworks serve to complicate the cybersecurity challenge further and too often results in senior leadership assuming a state of blissful ignorance. This study sheds light on the key factors contributing to the chaotic state of affairs and presents a roadmap to a more deliberate and proactive approach to cybersecurity risk management.     

Board directors with foreign experience and stock price crash risk: Evidence from China

This study examines the impact of board directors with foreign experience (BDFEs) on stock price crash risk. We find that BDFEs help reduce crash risk. This association is robust to a series of robustness checks, including a firm fixed effects model, controlling for possibly omitted variables, and instrumental variable estimations. Moreover, we find that the negative association between BDFEs and crash risk is more pronounced for firms with more agency problems, weaker corporate governance, and less overall transparency. Our findings suggest that the characteristics of board directors matter in determining stock price crash risk.     

Relief aid stocking decisions under bilateral agency cooperation

We aim to quantify the benefits of cooperation between humanitarian relief agencies in terms of stocking decisions. We consider two agencies that stock the same type of relief item at different locations prone to individual disaster risks and agree to transship the shortage amount from available stocks in case of a disaster. We incorporate the disaster risk to the Newsvendor model by conditioning the stock quantity decisions on the event that a major disaster occurs within the lifetime of the stocked relief item. We optimize the stock quantity for each agency in response to the other's quantity and compute a Nash Equilibrium solution numerically. We apply this game theoretic approach to the case of earthquake preparedness in Istanbul to optimize the stocking decisions of an agency for shelter units in cooperation with another agency. We investigate the characteristics of the solutions under various parameter settings and identify cases in which cooperation may be beneficial to one or both of the agencies.     

Operational risk quantified with spectral risk measures: a refined closed-form approximation

The quantification of operational risk has become an important issue as a result of the new capital charges required by the Basel Capital Accord (Basel II) to cover the potential losses of this type of risk. In this paper, we investigate second-order approximation of operational risk quantified with spectral risk measures (OpSRMs) within the theory of second-order regular variation (2RV) and second-order subexponentiality. The result shows that asymptotically two cases (the fast convergence case and the slow convergence) arise depending on the range of the second-order parameter. We also show that the second-order approximation under 2RV is asymptotically equivalent to the slow convergence case. A number of Monte Carlo simulations for a range of empirically relevant frequency and severity distributions are employed to illustrate the performance of our second-order results. The simulation results indicate that our second-order approximations tend to reduce the estimation errors to a great degree, especially for the fast convergence case, and are able to capture the sub-extremal behavior of OpSRMs better than the first-order approximation. Our asymptotic results have implications for the regulation of financial institutions, and may provide further insights into the measurement and management of operational risk.     

严监管背景下农信社合规风险管理体系建设

2018年,银行业监管环境进一步趋严,不但强调对银行的监管,更提出了对监管人员职责的监管,这种严格的外部监管环境对农信社的合规风险管理带来了极大的挑战。农信社合规风险管理体系的建设和完善已势不容缓。论文提出了农信社合规风险管理体系建设要从战略定位、文化渗透、防线搭建、专业专职化、考核和追究六个维度入手,推进合规风险管理长效机制的建设。     

The mechanism of credit risk contagion among internet P2P lending platforms based on a SEIR model with time-lag

The credit risk contagion of Internet peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms is an important part of Internet financial risk management and supervision. This study analyzes the contagion path of credit risk in Internet P2P lending. Based on complex network theory and the theory of infectious disease dynamics, the characteristics of Internet P2P lending development are combined to construct a SEIR model of credit risk transmission among Internet P2P lending platforms with time lag, and the robustness of the model is analyzed and proven. The influence of platform correlations, the susceptible immune rate, the platform elimination rate, contagion latency, the saturation coefficient, and the susceptibility input rate on credit risk contagion behavior among Internet P2P lending platforms is analyzed, using the equilibrium point and threshold value. The impact of each variable is analyzed by simulation. Corresponding countermeasures and suggestions are proposed to prevent and control credit risk contagion among these platforms.     

时间压力对网络冲动性购买的影响研究：交易效用和感知风险的调节

以往关于时间压力对冲动性购买影响的研究结论具有两面性，即促进或抑制。文章引入交易效用和感知风险两个调节变量，通过两个实验探讨了时间压力对网络冲动性购买倾向影响的边界条件。首先，当交易效用较高时，时间压力的增加会导致其网络冲动性购买倾向的提高；而当交易效用较低时，时间压力的增加会导致其网络冲动性购买倾向的降低（实验一）。其次，当人们感知风险较低时，时间压力的增加会导致其网络冲动性购买倾向的提高；而当人们感知风险较高时，时间压力的增加会导致其网络冲动性购买倾向的降低（实验二）。研究结论可以帮助电商企业进一步了解消费者的冲动性购买行为，充分利用时间压力的影响，制定更灵活有效的促销策略。