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Everyday Life Politics and Public Policy

Healthcare applications of predictive algorithms: A possible solution to physicians’ biases?  

Artificial Intelligence has long held the promise of improving predictions in healthcare solutions, a promise which is now becoming a reality in many settings, first and foremost the US, where in the past years many commercial algorithms have received FDA regulatory approval for broad clinical use. Indeed, the application of Machine Learning, a type of AI which allows software […]

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Everyday Life Politics and Public Policy

Defaults: the role of the status quo in healthcare solutions

Defaults are simple, affordable, and cost-efficient solutions which can be introduced in order to elicit the desired behaviour by individuals. They are one of the most intuitive mechanisms implemented in choice architecture, and their use can be applied to a range of different choice-making settings, as they simply leverage on the assumption that individuals are disproportionately more likely to stick to the option presented to them rather than actively switching to an alternative. The […]

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Politics and Public Policy

Public sector management: biases and agency problems

Leaders too often assume that their managerial strategies can be based on a rational analysis of data, trends and opportunities. Nonetheless, cognitive biases and agency problems have the power of shaping leaders’ decisions and employees’ actions alike. If an organizational strategy aspires to be truly rational, it should therefore account for the irrationality of individuals’ and groups’ behaviours, as dynamics playing out in the background are often the biggest driver of what gets decided […]

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Politics and Public Policy

Closing the racial gap in police forces

The racial gap in law enforcement has critical negative effects in terms of internal department dynamics and of interaction with policed communities. Closing this racial gap would ensure that the demographic of the police forces matches the demographic of the neighbourhoods they serve, consequently increasing their representativeness and improving their legitimacy. This lack of diversity is particularly critical in the United States, where Federal data collected from 467 local police departments showed that, between 2007 and 2016, more than two thirds of these departments became whiter with respect to […]

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External Events Politics and Public Policy

The untold side of voting behaviour

How is voting behaviour influenced by cognitive biases? In which ways does social interaction affect the beliefs of individuals? And what are the psychological determinants of support for either a liberal or conservative ideology? The event held on April 7, 2021 answered these and more questions, offering us some insight on the behavioural and psychological underpinnings of political preferences of voters.   With Bocconi Professor Catherine De Vries as our moderator, we invited as our speakers Dan Braha, Full Professor at University of Massachusetts, and Yoel Inbar, Associate […]