Do People Want Optimal Deterrence?

"Choice" in health care: what do people really want?

Proposals to expand the individual health insurance market and promote health savings accounts are intended to provide consumers with more "choice." The types of choices people prefer, however, are not well understood. This analysis of survey data finds that having a choice of health care providers matters more to people than having a choice of health plans. Dissatisfaction among adults with no...

When Do People Want AI to Make Decisions?

AI systems are now or will soon be sophisticated enough to make consequential decisions. Although this technology has flourished, we also need public appraisals of AI systems playing these more important roles. This article reports surveys of preferences for and against AI systems making decisions in various domains as well as experiments that intervene on these preferences. We find that these ...

Do Punitive Damages Promote Deterrence?

The paper explores the deterrent effect of punitive damages when capital investment is endogenous to the legal rule. Irrespective of the level of damages, firms can reduce their expected liabilities by either increasing safety (the law’s intended goal) or reducing wealth exposed to liability. We show that punitive damages can exacerbate this wealth reduction effect and thereby reduce deterrence...

What sort of people do we want? The ethics of changing people through genetic engineering.

Learning What People (Don't) Want

Recommender systems make use of a database of user ratings to generate personalized recommendations and help people to nd relevant products, items, or documents. In this paper, we present a probabilistic, model-based framework for user ratings based on a novel collaborative ltering technique that performs an automatic decomposition of user preferences. Our approach has several bene ts, includin...