What is certain about uncertainty?

That is the title of an article by Cascaldi-Garcia et al. (2023) in the Journal of Economic Literature. I summarize some of the key findings below. Definitions: Risk: Applies to situations in which the outcome is unknown to decision makers, but the probability distribution governing the outcome is known” Volatility. Often used synonymously with risk,…

Uncertainty and Vaccination Decisions

An interesting result from Courbage and Peter (2021): …uncertainty about the probability of side effects and the efficacy of the vaccine always reduces take-up under ambiguity aversion. However, uncertainty about the underlying disease, being the probability of sickness or the probability of a severe course of disease, may either encourage or discourage vaccination. Because vaccination…

Why don’t payers adopt my technology?

Why don’t payers adopt innovative approaches to treat mental illness? For instance, crisis intervention programs, recovery-focused consumer education programs, telehealth programs, and on-line treatment programs have sometimes have had problems receiving reimbursement from payers. Monica Oss of OpenMinds takes the payers’ perspective: Often, the organization proposing the new program comes to the table with an…

When does diversification increase risk?

Why did the financial crisis occur?  One reason may be due to too much institutional diversification.  George Sugihara explains how even when individual institutions diversify, system-wide risk can increase exponentially. “Leading up to the crash, there was a marked increase in homogeneity among institutions, both in their revenue-generating strategies as well as in their risk-management strategies, thus…

GM-UAW deal

An explanation for the recent General Motors-United Auto Workers deal is pretty simple: it is a transfer of risk.  GM will set up a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) which will be controlled by the union.  According to the Detroit Free Press (” UAW ratifies”) GM will place about $30 billion dollars in the account…