Behavioural Insights Applied to Policy - European Report 2016

This report covers a wealth of policy initiatives across 32 European countries either implicitly or explicitly informed by behavioural insights (BIs). It reviews institutional developments around the application for behavioural insights for policy and puts forward a comparative framework (PRECIS) describing behavioural insights teams with six key features. The report reaches four main conclusions: i) in terms of capacity-building, there is significant dynamism and growing appetite to apply BIs to policy-making; ii) links between policy-making and academy communities can be strengthened and analysing large datasets offers great potential; iii) systematic application of BIs throughout the policy cycle can advance evidence-based policy-making; iv) there is a need for more research on the long-term impacts of policy interventions.JRC.DDG.02-Foresight and Behavioural Insight

Behavioural insights applied to policy: European Report 2016

Joana Sousa Lourenço, Emanuele Ciriolo, Sara Rafael Almeida, and Xavier TroussardBehavioural Insights Applied to Policy (BIAP) 2016 draws on information collected via desk research, a survey and personal exchanges, including interviews with policy-makers, academics and a range of other stakeholders from 32 countries (28 EU Member States and the 4 EFTA countries). Such information is used to provide a twofold overview of:  Behavioural policy initiatives;  Institutional developments regarding the policy application of BIs.

Zether: Towards Privacy in a Smart Contract World

Blockchain-based smart contract platforms like Ethereum have become quite popular as a way to remove trust and add transparency to distributed applications. While different types of important applications can be easily built on such platforms, there does not seem to be an easy way to add a meaningful level of privacy to them. In this paper, we propose Zether, a fully-decentralized, confidential payment mechanism that is compatible with Ethereum and other smart contract platforms. We take an account-based approach similar to Ethereum for efficiency and usability. We design a new smart contract that keeps the account balances encrypted and exposes methods to deposit, transfer and withdraw funds to/from accounts through cryptographic proofs. We describe techniques to protect Zether against replay attacks and front-running situations. We also develop a mechanism to enable interoperability with arbitrary smart contracts. This helps to make several popular applications like auctions, payment channels, voting, etc. confidential. As a part of our protocol, we propose $\Sigma$-Bullets, an improvement of the existing zero-knowledge proof system, Bulletproofs. $\Sigma$-Bullets make Bulletproofs more inter-operable with Sigma protocols, which is of general interest. We implement Zether as an Ethereum smart contract and show the practicality of our design by measuring the amount of gas used by the Zether contract. A Zether confidential transaction costs about 0.014 ETH or approximately $1.51 (as of early Feb, 2019). We discuss how small changes to Ethereum, which are already being discussed independently of Zether, would drastically reduce this cost

Mirror - Vol. 04, No. 23 - March 19, 1981

The Mirror (sometimes called the Fairfield Mirror) is the official student newspaper of Fairfield University, and is published weekly during the academic year (September - May). It runs from 1977 - the present; current issues are available online.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/archives-mirror/1080/thumbnail.jp

Verifiably Secure Devices

We put forward the notion of a verifiably secure device, in essence a stronger notion of secure computation, and achieve it in the ballot-box model. Verifiably secure devices1. Provide a perfect solution to the problem of achieving correlated equilibrium, an important and extensively investigated problem at the intersection of game theory, cryptography and efficient algorithms; and2. Enable the secure evaluation of multiple interdependent functions

Goals and Plans in Protective Decision Making

Protective decisions are often puzzling. Among other anomalies, people insure against non-catastrophic events, underinsure against catastrophic risks, and allow extraneous factors to influence insurance purchases and other protective decisions. Neither expected utility theory nor prospect theory can explain these anomalies satisfactorily. We propose a constructed-choice model for general decision making. The model departs from utility theory and prospect theory in its treatment of multiple goals and it suggests several different ways in which context can affect choice. To apply this model to the above anomalies, we consider many different insurance-related goals, organized in a taxonomy, and we consider the effects of context on goals, resources, plans and decision rules. The paper concludes by suggesting some prescriptions for improving individual decision making with respect to protective measures.