Fatalism, beliefs, and behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Little is known about how people's beliefs concerning the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) influence their behavior. To shed light on this, we conduct an online experiment ( n = 3 , 610 ) with US and UK residents. Participants are randomly allocated to a control group or to one of two treatment groups. The treatment groups are shown upper- or lower-bound expert estimates of the infectiousness of the virus. We present three main empirical findings. First, individuals dramatically overestimate the dangerousness and infectiousness of COVID-19 relative to expert opinion. Second, providing people with expert information partially corrects their beliefs about the virus. Third, the more infectious people believe that COVID-19 is, the less willing they are to take protective measures, a finding we dub the "fatalism effect". We develop a formal model that can explain the fatalism effect and discuss its implications for optimal policy during the pandemic.

Testing for crowd out in social nudges: Evidence from a natural field experiment in the market for electricity.

This study considers the response of household electricity consumption to social nudges during peak load events. Our investigation considers two social nudges. The first targets conservation during peak load events, while the second promotes aggregate conservation. Using data from a natural field experiment with 42,100 households, we find that both social nudges reduce peak load electricity consumption by 2 to 4% when implemented in isolation and by nearly 7% when implemented in combination. These findings suggest an important role for social nudges in the regulation of electricity markets and a limited role for crowd out effects.

Social redistribution of pain and money.

People show empathic responses to others' pain, yet how they choose to apportion pain between themselves and others is not well understood. To address this question, we observed choices to reapportion social allocations of painful stimuli and, for comparison, also elicited equivalent choices with money. On average people sought to equalize allocations of both pain and money, in a manner which indicated that inequality carried an increasing marginal cost. Preferences for pain were more altruistic than for money, with several participants assigning more than half the pain to themselves. Our data indicate that, given concern for others, the fundamental principle of diminishing marginal utility motivates spreading costs across individuals. A model incorporating this assumption outperformed existing models of social utility in explaining the data. By implementing selected allocations for real, we also found that while inequality per se did not influence pain perception, altruistic behavior had an intrinsic analgesic effect for the recipient.

Valuing lives and life years: anomalies, implications, and an alternative.

Many government interventions seek to reduce the risk of death. The value of preventing a fatality (VPF) is the monetary amount associated with each statistical death that an intervention can be expected to prevent. The VPF has been estimated using a preference-based approach, either by observing market behaviour (revealed preferences) or by asking hypothetical questions that seek to replicate the market (stated preferences). The VPF has been shown to differ across and within these methods. In theory, the VPF should vary according to factors such as baseline and background risk, but, in practice, the estimates vary more by theoretically irrelevant factors, such as the starting point in stated preference studies. This variation makes it difficult to choose one unique VPF. The theoretically irrelevant factors also affect the estimates of the monetary value of a statistical life year and the value of a quality-adjusted life year. In light of such problems, it may be fruitful to focus more research efforts on generating the VPF using an approach based on the subjective well-being associated with different states of the world.

Tetraammineruthenium(II) and -ruthenium(III) Complexes of o-Benzoquinone Diimine and Their Redox Series.

The complexes [Ru(NH(3))(4)(4,5-R(2)-bqdi)](n)(+) where bqdi is o-benzoquinone diimine, R = H, Cl, or OMe, and n = 2 or 3 have been characterized by elemental analysis, optical spectroscopy, electrochemistry, spectroelectrochemistry, and electron paramagnetic and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopies. ZINDO/S calculations provide a very detailed picture of the degree of mixing existing between metal and ligand orbitals. Both pi back-donation and ligand pi-d mixing are important such that these compounds are considered to be extensively delocalized. In the Ru(III) systems compared with the Ru(II) systems, ligand pi-d mixing is somewhat more important and pi back-donation somewhat less important. Assignments of the electronic spectra are presented in detail in terms of the degree of mixing in the various orbitals. Surprisingly, on the basis of the ZINDO analysis, the lowest energy, strong, visible-region band in the electronic spectra of the Ru(III) species is shown to be predominantly MLCT and not LMCT as might have been assumed.