Social preferences or sacred values? Theory and evidence of deontological motivations.

Recent advances in economic theory, largely motivated by experimental findings, have led to the adoption of models of human behavior where decision-makers take into consideration not only their own payoff but also others' payoffs and any potential consequences of these payoffs. Investigations of deontological motivations, where decision-makers make their choice based on not only the consequences of a decision but also the decision per se, have been rare. We provide a formal interpretation of major moral philosophies and a revealed preference method to distinguish the presence of deontological motivations from a purely consequentialist decision-maker whose preferences satisfy first-order stochastic dominance.

Intuition and exponential growth: bias and the roles of parameterization and complexity.

Exponential growth bias is the phenomenon that humans intuitively underestimate exponential growth. This article reports on an experiment where treatments differ in the parameterization of growth: Exponential growth is communicated to one group in terms of growth rates, and in terms of doubling times to the other. Exponential growth bias is much smaller when doubling times are employed.

How to better communicate the exponential growth of infectious diseases.

Exponential growth bias is the phenomenon whereby humans underestimate exponential growth. In the context of infectious diseases, this bias may lead to a failure to understand the magnitude of the benefit of non-pharmaceutical interventions. Communicating the same scenario in different ways (framing) has been found to have a large impact on people's evaluations and behavior in the contexts of social behavior, risk taking and health care.