Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship
Michael E. Porter, Claas van der Linde · 1 Nov 1995
Accepting a fixed trade-off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress. Studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts, ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation. They typically overestimated compliance costs, neglected innovation offsets, and disregarded the affected industry's initial competitiveness. Rather than simply…
Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election
Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow · 1 May 2017
Following the 2016 US presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories (“fake news”), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new…
Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making
Shane Frederick · 1 Nov 2005
This paper introduces a three-item “Cognitive Reflection Test” (CRT) as a simple measure of one type of cognitive ability—the ability or disposition to reflect on a question and resist reporting the first response that comes to mind. The author will show that CRT scores are predictive of the types of choices that feature prominently in…
Institutions
Douglass C. North · 1 Feb 1991
Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). Throughout history, institutions have been devised by human beings to create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange. Together with the standard…
Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias
Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, Richard H. Thaler · 1 Feb 1991
A wine-loving economist we know purchased some nice Bordeaux wines years ago at low prices. The wines have greatly appreciated in value, so that a bottle that cost only $10 when purchased would now fetch $200 at auction. This economist now drinks some of this wine occasionally, but would neither be willing to sell the…
