Categories
Business World

How biases affect betting in the world’s most betted-on sport, football

Football, or soccer, as you wish to call it, is the most popular sport in the world by a landlside. Its viewership numbers dominate those of any other sport. For comparison’s sake, the NFL Super Bowl, which is the most-watched sporting event in the United States, reached a total viewership of just under 100 million […]

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Everyday Life

More insects, less bias: Towards overcoming cultural differences

An overconsumption of meat and increasing pressure on land and water resources is making it challenging to feed a population that is growing at a faster pace than the food supply chain. The over-exploitation of agricultural resources and the natural ecosystem is contributing to severe issues such as global warming, food insecurity and mineral depletion. […]

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Everyday Life

Unwillingly dishonest: cheating and self-deception

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him…”  Fëdor Dostoevskij, The Brothers Karamazov We are constantly exposed to examples of dishonest behavior. We read about it in the news or […]

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Politics and Public Policy

Digital nudges and politics: the influence of social media on voting behavior  

The behavioral tool of nudging is becoming extremely popular among policymakers as a new powerful instrument to alter people’s behavior in a predictable way, without however the need to restrain the set of options of actors or significantly changing their economic incentives.   However, with the advent of social media and the huge and unprecedented quantity of data potentially collectible from online platforms, society is now faced with an ethical question on nudging techniques and their possible harmful […]

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Environment Politics and Public Policy

Policy implications in environmental policy design: Miami-Dade County case study

Many problems require more than one solution. The scientific consensus is that climate change is a very real and urgent problem, and its consequences will be dire if nothing is done about it. In this article, I will share an overview of the implications governments have to face regarding environmental policy design, with a specific […]

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Politics and Public Policy

Behavioral politics: Do we shape the polls or do they shape the vote?

On January 3rd, 2008 in Iowa, Obama took a huge step towards being elected as the 44th president of the USA. It was the night of the first Democratic primary and Obama was sitting at the victory throne with 38% of the Democratic vote, leaving John Edwards in the second line with 30%  and Hillary […]

Categories
External Events

Public health care and nudges: How Behavioral Economics can help the vaccination problem

As we are approaching the second anniversary of the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, one can take a moment to reflect on the development of the health emergency. Loss, lockdowns, curfews, overloaded health care systems, and the anticipation of vaccinations. When the vaccinations finally hit the markets, many were eager to finally get their shot […]

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Everyday Life

Hyperbolic discouting and healthcare: An ambiguous relation

Cigarette smoking, like other forms of drug dependence, is characterized by rapid loss of subjective value for delayed outcomes, particularly for the drug of dependence.  –Behavioural pharmacologist Warren K. Bickel, et al. Hyperbolic Discounting 101  Hyperbolic discounting is our inclination to choose immediate rewards over rewards that come later in the future, even when these immediate rewards are […]

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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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Philosophy and Literature

A behavioral lesson from the Iliad and the Odyssey

In 1951 Eric Dodds, an Irish philologist and anthropologist, published “The Greeks and the Irrational”, a famous book in which he presented two antithetical concepts applied to the study of the Ancient Greece: the “shame culture” and the “guilt culture”.  Dodds focused his inquiry on the earliest stages of the Greek culture, analyzing the Homeric world, […]