Behavioral Economics in Military Personnel Research and Policy

Behavioral economics is a burgeoning field of research that is being used to increase the effectiveness of military policies, programs, and operations. This chapter provides an overview of the origins of behavioral economics, key concepts, how behavioral economics research translates into applied behavioral change, and the rise of behavioral economics teams in government around the world. The chapter outlines how behavioral economics is being used within the military, with specific examples from Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel research to illustrate how this field is being applied to military behavioral sciences.

TWO CULTURES : SOCIAL IDEAS AND SOCIAL PRACTICES IN THE PROJECT “POTENTIALS – NEW FORM OF SOCIAL CAPITAL IN TOWN COMMUNITY PRZASNYSZ”

The article consists of two parts. In the first part, the author returns to the classic text by C.P. Snow entitled Two Cultures 1959, and justifies its obsolescence by claiming that in recent decades, the natural sciences have become closer to the traditional humanities and have undergone a kind of 'philosophizing', while knowledge accumulated in the humanities and social sciences is increasingly organized by seeking answers to questions of a practical nature. The author's comment boils down to a statement that this is a very unfortunate course of events because, among other things, before we start answering questions about how to achieve these or other goals, it is good to know that it is worthwhile to achieve them. In short, it is not out of the question that the gradual elimination of classical questions about meanings and values from the humanities and social sciences contributes to highly ambivalent assessments of 'modernity'. In the second part, the author does not ask about the rationale behind the objection to various discriminatory practices, but he does ask how - within the framework of the "Potentials..." project - these mechanisms were tried to be dealt with, using the key elements of the so-called "behavioral economics", and he describes the experiences connected with it.

Nonconcave Utility Maximization with Portfolio Bounds

The problems of nonconcave utility maximization appear in many areas of finance and economics, such as in behavioral economics, incentive schemes, aspiration utility, and goal-reaching problems. Existing literature solves these problems using the concavification principle. We provide a framework for solving nonconcave utility maximization problems, where the concavification principle may not hold, and the utility functions can be discontinuous. We find that adding portfolio bounds can offer distinct economic insights and implications consistent with existing empirical findings. Theoretically, by introducing a new definition of viscosity solution, we show that a monotone, stable, and consistent finite difference scheme converges to the value functions of the nonconcave utility maximization problems. This paper was accepted by Agostino Capponi, finance.

Means Paternalism and the Problem of Indeterminacy

Many contemporary defenders of paternalist interventions favor a version of paternalism focused on how people often choose the wrong means given their own ends. This idea is typically justified by empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics. To the extent that paternalist interventions can then target the promotion of goals that can be said to be our own, such interventions are prima facie less problematic. One version of this argument starts from the idea that it is meaningful to ascribe to us preferences that we would have if were fully rational, informed and in control over our actions. It is argued here, however, that the very body of empirical results that means paternalists typically rely on also undermines this idea as a robust enough notion. A more modest approach to paternalist interventions, on which such policies are understood as enmeshed with welfare-state policies promoting certain primary goods, is then proposed instead.

Forbidden Zones for the Expectations of Data: New Mathematical Methods and Models for Behavioral Economics

A forbidden zone theorem, hypothesis, and applied mathematical method and model are introduced in the present article. The method and model are based on the forbidden zones and hypothesis. The article is initiated by the well-known generic problems concerned with the mathematical description of the behavior of a man. The essence of the problems consists in biases of preferences and decisions of a man in comparison with predictions of the probability theory. The model is uniformly and successfully applied for different domains. The ultimate goal of the research is to solve some generic problems of behavioral economics, decision theories, and the social sciences.