Temporal Decision-Making: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience

Decisions frequently have consequences that play out over time and these temporal factors can exert strong influences on behavior. For example, decision-makers exhibit delay discounting, behaving as though immediately consumable goods are more valuable than those available only after some delay. With the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, we are now beginning to characterize the physiological bases of such behavior in humans and to link work on this topic from neuroscience, psychology, and economics. Here we review recent neurocognitive investigations of temporal decision-making and outline the theoretical picture that is beginning to take shape. Taken as a whole, this body of work illustrates the progress made in understanding temporal choice behavior. However, we also note several questions that remain unresolved and areas where future work is needed

Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar: Cultural and Digital Labour in the Context of Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being

The task of this work is to apply thoughts from Georg Lukács’ final book, the Ontology of Social Being, for the theoretical analysis of cultural and digital labour. It discusses Lukács’ concepts of work and communication and relates them to the analysis of cultural and digital work. It also analyses his conception of the relation of labour and ideology and points out how we can make use of it for critically understanding social media ideologies. Lukács opposes the dualist separation of the realms of work and ideas. He introduces in this context the notion of teleological positing that allows us to better understand cultural and digital labour as well as associated ideologies, such as the engaging/connecting/sharing-ideology, today. The analysis shows that Lukács’ Ontology is in the age of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter still a very relevant book, although it has thus far not received the attention that it deserves. This article also introduces the Ontology’s main ideas on work and culture, which is important because large parts of the book have not been translated from the German original into English. Lukács’ notion of teleological positing is crucial for understanding the common features of the economy and culture

A critical analysis of the efficacy of law as a tool to achieve gender equality and to address the problem of domestic violence : The case of Trinidad and Tobago

Law is often perceived as an instrument that can effect social change. National law in Trinidad and Tobago, prima facie providing for gender equality, does not fully contemplate issues of particular concern to women, such as domestic violence. Gender equality and domestic violence are unwitting partners as women cannot achieve the former without first addressing the latter. Additionally, problems such as male dominance in politico-legal structures and lack of political will create practical obstacles to the realisation of gender equality and/or the full potential of the law. A case study of Trinidad and Tobago shows that the achievement of legal advances for women is particularly difficult where practical measures are not implemented domestically. Honouring international commitments subsequently becomes problematic as they do not guarantee change nationally and they, too, are sidelined. Gender equality and domestic violence are not given priority domestically and laws aimed towards protecting women and women’s rights are ineffective, scant and/or not enforced. The only way to achieve gender equality is through a multilevel approach from above (the UN) and, perhaps, more importantly, from below, as women have the potential to effect real national and international legal and institutional change to ensure gender equality at both levels.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Discounting of delayed rewards is not hyperbolic

Delay discounting refers to decision-makers' tendency to value immediately available goods more than identical goods available only after some delay. In violation of standard economic theory, decisionmakers frequently exhibit dynamic inconsistency; their preferences change simply due to the passage of time. The standard explanation for this behavior has appealed to the nature of decision-makers' discount functions, specifically positing a hyperbolic discount function. Though this explanation has been largely accepted, there has been surprisingly little work examining whether preference reversals are actually consistent with hyperbolic discounting. The current study holds hyperbolic discounting to the same empirical standard that exponential discounting has been held to and finds that choice behavior is not consistent with hyperbolic discounting. Despite the overwhelming focus placed on hyperbolic discounting, the current findings cast doubt on hyperbolic discounting as an explanation of decision-makers' undesirable preference reversals and as an explanation of delay discounting behavior in general. Keywords: delay discounting, intertemporal choice, decision making, dynamic inconsistency, hyperbolic Delay discounting refers to the robust finding that animals, including humans, behave as though immediately consumable goods are more valuable than those only available after some delay. For example, a decision-maker might choose $100 delivered immediately over$200 to be delivered in 3 years. One of the major empirical questions regarding such choices has focused on the discount function-the mathematical function specifying the relationship between reward magnitude, delay, and subjective value. Initial theoretical work in economics where V D represents the current value of a reward that will be delivered after a delay D, k represents the decision-maker's discount rate, and V 0 represents the undiscounted value of that same reward (i.e., the value of that reward if it were available immediately). Unfortunately, the vast majority of empirical evidence has demonstrated that humans The distinction between exponential and hyperbolic discounting may, at first, appear to be a bit of mathematical nitpicking. However, these two different discounting schemes represent very different conceptualizations of how delayed rewards are evaluated and have serious implications for behavior. Exponential discounting represents how bank loans work; the value of a delayed reward declines by a fixed percentage per unit of time. Hyperbolic discounters, on the other hand, behave as though their discount rates increase as the delivery of a delayed reward draws near. Thus, hyperbolic discounters appear to exhibit patience when dealing with rewards in the distant future only to find that this patience diminishes as rewards move closer in time. The critical problem with the diminishing patience exhibited by hyperbolic discounters is that it tends to produce preferences that shift in systematic and predicable ways due to the simple passage of time; what economists refer to as dynamic inconsistency. For example, a hyperbolic discounter might prefer $200 delivered in 2 years over$100 delivered in 1 year (a patient preference) only to reverse this preference a year later, preferring an immediate $100 over$200 delivered in 1 year (an impatient preference). 1 Because the former pair of rewards will become the latter pair of rewards in 1 year, the preferences described by hyperbolic discounting are 1 To be clear, hyperbolic discounting does not imply that preferences over an arbitrary pair of rewards will reverse for any change in delay. Whether or not a hyperbolic discounter reverses their preferences as time passes depends on the specific reward magnitudes, delays, and discount rates. That being said, changes in delay always alter the strength of a hyperbolic discounter's preference (i.e., the difference between the discounted value of the two rewards) in the predicted direction, even when actual choices do not reverse. In addition, reward pairs and an appropriate delay can always be found such that any non-exponential discounter (hyperbolic or otherwise) is guaranteed to reverse their preference (and thus represent an arbitrage opportunity)

Shared losses reduce sensitivity to risk: A laboratory study of moral hazard

Moral hazards are said to occur when one party makes decisions that have potential negative consequences that will either be fully or partially experienced by another party. The present experiment sought to explore moral hazard in a laboratory setting. Participants made choices between certain and risky rewards. On some trials, participants bore the full brunt of a loss if the risky reward was chosen and lost. On other trials, participants believed losses would be shared with another party creating the opportunity for moral hazard. Our design allowed us to measure whether the presence of a moral hazard influenced participants’ choice behavior and to quantify the magnitude of this influence. Results suggested that participants were more tolerant of risk when they believed losses would be shared with another party compared to choices when all of the loss would be experienced personally. More importantly, concern for the third party losses appeared to exert no influence on choices whatsoever. These results were found when the third party was anonymous (Experiment 1) but also when they met the third party face-to-face (Experiment 2). The relationship between the current results and real-life moral hazards, as well as possible future research directions, is discussed