This paper seeks to discover whether aviation security measures are costeffective by considering their effectiveness, their cost and expected lives saved as a result of such expenditure. An assessment of the Federal Air Marshal Service suggests that the annual cost is $180 million per life saved. This is greatly in excess of the regulatory safety goal (societal willingness to pay to save a life...

David Stenhouse’s classical definition of intelligence as “adaptively variable behavior within the lifetime of the individual” (Stenhouse, 1974, in Trewavas, 2003), widely accepted among biologists, explicitly refers to behavior, requiring thus a previous understanding of this concept. Here, we are providing a biologists’ perspective, which may differ from that of psychologists, economists or c...

Institutional economics traces its roots to the works, beginning in the late nineteenth century, of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons and Wesley C. Mitchell. They believed that orthodox economic theory, based on deduction from axioms, was not a proper foundation to study the economy. They attempted to establish relations between economic actors as defined by important economic institutions. Cla...

No matter how commonly the term “innovation” or “technological progress” has been used in economics, or more generally, in the social sciences, a concrete analytical or computational model of innovation is not yet available. Studies addressing specific technology advancements in different scientific and engineering fields are, of course, not lacking; however, the general representation of techn...

It is a source of confusion that economists for decades have worked on ‘game theory’ while studying economic behaviour. However, while not focused on games in the recreational sense this perspective does provide a highly meticulous complementary framework for the understanding of computer game structure and player behaviour. This article attempts to extract useful analytic concepts and insights...

Recent experimental evidence suggests that some people dislike telling lies, and tell the truth even at a cost. We use experiments as well to study the socio-demographic covariates of such lie aversion, and find gender and religiosity to be without predictive value. However, subjects’ major is predictive: Business and Economics (B&E) subjects are significantly less lie averse than other majors....

For some twenty-five years after the end of World War II, the IS-LM model dominated macroeconomics. With the advent of the new classical macroeconomics in the early 1970s, that dominance was at first challenged and then broken. Yet the IS-LM model lives on. While no longer central to the graduate training of most macroeconomists or to cutting-edge macroeconomic research, the IS-LM model continu...

Imagine that once upon a time the policymakers of the emerging British Empire believed that a nation’s wealth came from the magnitude of its trade with distant nations. In pursuit of this belief, they set up the Imperial Trade Commission, which in turn decided that the way to optimize trade with India was to create the East India Company and give it a monopoly over trade with India. Along came ...

A) For health economists demand analysis seeks to identify which factors are most influential in determining how much care people are willing to purchase. That knowledge can be used to forecast demand more accurately and to predict changes in utilisation. The classical determinants of demand are incidence of illness and a set of cultural-demographic and economics factors. The assumption of cons...