Deciding on behalf of others does not mitigate selfishness: an experiment

We test whether deciding on behalf of a passive third party makes participants less selfish in a subsequent decision on behalf of themselves. We find that, in a standard dictator game and in a modified dictator game that allows for "moral wiggle room”, the experience of having decided for others does not mitigate selfishness

Pay for performance with motivated employees

Heterogeneity in intrinsic motivation affects the optimal contract offered to employees in teams. Under individual incentives, the effort exerted by both motivated and selfish employees is distorted. This distortion is mitigated if employees receive a wage based on team performance. As a result, the principal prefers to use team incentives, while motivated employees are better off with individual incentives

Investment in education under disappointment aversion

This paper develops a model of risky investment in education under disappointment aversion, modelled as loss aversion around one's endogenous expectation. The model shows that disappointment aversion reduces investments in education for lower ability people and increases investments for higher ability people, thereby magnifying the gap between them generated by the riskiness of education

The Cost-Balanced Path Problem: A Mathematical Formulation and Complexity Analysis

This paper introduces a new variant of the Shortest Path Problem (SPP) called the Cost-Balanced Path Problem (CBPP). Various real problems can either be modeled as BCPP or include BCPP as a sub-problem. We prove several properties related to the complexity of the CBPP problem. In particular, we demonstrate that the problem is NP-hard in its general version, but it becomes solvable in polynomial time in a specific family of instances. Moreover, a mathematical formulation of the CBPP, as a mixed-integer programming model, is proposed, and some additional constraints for modeling real requirements are given. This paper validates the proposed model and its extensions with experimental tests based on random instances. The analysis of the results of the computational experiments shows that the proposed model and its extension can be used to model many real applications. Obviously, due to the problem complexity, the main limitation of the proposed approach is related to the size of the instances. A heuristic solution approach should be required for larger-sized and more complex instances

A Constructive Heuristics and an Iterated Neighborhood Search Procedure to Solve the Cost-Balanced Path Problem

This paper presents a new heuristic algorithm tailored to solve large instances of an NP-hard variant of the shortest path problem, denoted the cost-balanced path problem, recently proposed in the literature. The problem consists in finding the origin–destination path in a direct graph, having both negative and positive weights associated with the arcs, such that the total sum of the weights of the selected arcs is as close to zero as possible. At least to the authors’ knowledge, there are no solution algorithms for facing this problem. The proposed algorithm integrates a constructive procedure and an improvement procedure, and it is validated thanks to the implementation of an iterated neighborhood search procedure. The reported numerical experimentation shows that the proposed algorithm is computationally very efficient. In particular, the proposed algorithm is most suitable in the case of large instances where it is possible to prove the existence of a perfectly balanced path and thus the optimality of the solution by finding a good percentage of optimal solutions in negligible computational time

Deciding on behalf of others does not mitigate selfishness

We test whether deciding on behalf of a passive third party makes participants less selfish in a subsequent decision on behalf of themselves. We find that, in a standard dictator game and in a modified dictator game that allows for ”moral wiggle room”, the experience of having decided for others does not mitigate selfishness

Internalizing and externalizing symptoms among unaccompanied refugee and Italian adolescents

This study investigated the prevalence of emotional and behavioral symptoms in unaccompanied refugee adolescents living in Italy; an area which remains under-researched despite the relatively high number of asylum seekers registered in Italy compared to other industrialized countries. The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) for 6–18 year-olds was completed by a social worker or parent for each of the 120 participating adolescents; sixty male unaccompanied refugee adolescents and sixty male native Italian adolescents. The paper presents findings that illustrate high levels of emotional and behavioral problems in unaccompanied refugee youth living in Italy. On all components of the CBCL, unaccompanied refugee adolescents were found to present with significantly more problems, as reported by social workers, compared to the Italian group of adolescents. In the light of these results, the importance of interventions and culturally sensitive therapeutic programs for refugee youth is discussed

A two-stage solution approach for the Directed Rural Postman Problem with Turn Penalties

In this paper, we consider the Directed Rural Postman Problem with Turn Penalties (DRPP-TP). A solution is a tour that traverses all required arcs of the graph. The total cost of the tour is the sum of the lengths of the traversed arcs plus the penalties associated with the turns. One solution approach involves transforming the arc routing problem into an equivalent node routing problem. An alternative direct approach (without graph transformation) that involves two stages has been proposed in the literature. In the first part of this paper, we investigate the applicability of the direct approach. We identify several characteristics of the input instance that make this approach effective and present several limitations of this approach. In the second part of this paper, we describe an integer linear program that is combined with a local search algorithm. This combination produces high-quality solutions to the DRPP-TP in a reasonable amount of computing time. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V