Do Checklists Work?
June 15, 2018

"Checklists" have long-endured as an inexpensive--and seemingly efficacious--way to reduce risk flowing from tasks requiring...

Chess Grandmasters Show the Same Longevity Advantage as Elite Athletes
June 10, 2018

It’s well established that elite athletes have a longer life expectancy than the general public. A recent review of over 50 studies comprising half a million people estimated the athletic advantage to be between 4 and 8 years, on average. This comes as little surprise. One can easily imagine how the same genetic endowment and training necessary to develop physical prowess in sport might also manifest in physical health. Now for the first time, a study published in PLOS One (open access) shows...

Medicare Secondary Payer and Settlement Delay
June 6, 2018

The Medicare Secondary Payer Act of 1980 and its subsequent amendments require that insurers and self‐insured companies report settlements, awards, and judgments that involve a Medicare beneficiary to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The parties then may be required to compensate CMS for its conditional payments. In a simple settlement model, this makes settlement less likely. Also, the reporting delays and uncertainty regarding the size of these conditional payments are likely to further...

Law and Psychology Grows Up, Goes Online, and Replicates
June 3, 2018

Over the last 30 years, legal scholars have increasingly deployed experimental studies, particularly hypothetical scenarios, to test intuitions about legal reasoning and behavior. That movement has accelerated in the last decade, facilitated in large part by cheap and convenient Internet participant recruiting platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. The widespread use of online subjects, a practice that dramatically lowers the barriers to entry for experimental research, has been controversial. At the same...

On Preferring A to B, While Also Preferring B to A
May 29, 2018

In important contexts, people prefer option A to option B when they evaluate the two separately, but prefer option B to option...

Feasibility of a Health‐Utility Approach to Quantifying Noneconomic Losses from Personal Injury
May 27, 2018

There is wide agreement that existing approaches to valuing noneconomic losses from personal injury lack coherence. “Health‐utility” measurement—an approach developed in health economics for valuing health outcomes in public health and medicine—holds considerable promise for bringing greater rationality and consistency to assessments of injury‐related noneconomic loss. However, the feasibility of creating utility measures that are suitable for use in personal injury compensation has not been...

Do Checklists Make a Difference? A Natural Experiment from Food Safety Enforcement
May 26, 2018

Inspired by Atul Gawande's bestselling Checklist Manifesto, many commentators have called for checklists to solve complex problems in law and public policy. We study a unique natural experiment to provide the first systematic evidence of checklists in law. In 2005, the Public Health Department of Seattle and King County revised its health code, subjecting half of inspection items to a checklist, with others remaining on a free‐form recall basis. Through in‐depth qualitative analysis, we identify...

On Preferring A to B, While Also Preferring B to A
April 24, 2018

In important contexts, people prefer option A to option B when they evaluate the two separately, but prefer option B to option...

Apologies & Remedial Mismatches
April 22, 2018

While the context is admittedly horrific--victims of sexual abuse and the Catholic Church--data from the Netherlands, which...

Richard Thaler and the Rise of Behavioral Economics
March 2, 2018

The emergence of behavioral economics is one of the most significant conceptual developments in the social sciences in the past 40 years. The central figure in the field in its early years was Richard Thaler. In this article, I review and discuss his scientific contributions.