Time to leave: Computations of when to end a social interaction depend on opportunity costs, depression, and loneliness

Positive social relationships are vital for mental health. There is an ever-increasing understanding of the cognitive and computational mechanisms that underlie how we process others’ behaviours during social interactions. Yet fundamentally many conversations, partnerships and relationships have to end. However, little is known about how people decide when to leave. Theories of decision-making posit that people stop a behaviour in favour of another based on evidence accumulation processes, shaped by the value of alternative behaviours (opportunity costs). Do people compute evidence to leave social interactions based on the opportunity costs of connecting to others? Here, in a novel economic game, participants made decisions of when to leave partners in social environments with different opportunity costs for moving on. Across four studies we find that people leave partners more quickly when the opportunity costs are high, both in terms of the average generosity in the environment and the effort required to connect to the next partner. People’s leaving times could be accounted for by a fairness-adapted evidence accumulation model, with a lower threshold for leaving in high opportunity cost social environments. Moreover, decisions to leave were modulated by depression and loneliness scores, which were linked to an interaction between the fairness of a partner and the opportunity cost of the social environment. These findings demonstrate the cognitive and computational processes underlying decisions to leave social interactions, and highlight that loneliness and depression may be linked to an atypical dynamic allocation of time to social interactions.

A winter sport mega-event and its aftermath: A critical review of post-Olympic PyeongChang

Almost two years have passed since the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, and this small rural province has now fully returned to its ordinary routine. In this viewpoint article, I present a critical review of the aftermath of PyeongChang 2018. This short essay focuses on three areas: (a) environmental damage and its restoration process, (b) the construction of the sport facilities and their use after the event, and (c) the sustainability of social infrastructure built for the Winter Olympics. The critical appraisal of the post-Olympic PyeongChang reveals that first, the winter sporting competition is more likely to degrade the natural environment surrounding the Olympic venues than its summer counterpart. Second, winter sporting activities such as ski jumping and bobsled are less likely to develop into community sports due to specific equipment and skills required. Finally, because of this comparatively high opportunity cost, the Winter Olympic Games is an excessively expensive event to host. The 2018 Winter Olympic Games may be seen as South Korean cultural diplomacy at its best. Yet, underneath this South Korean winter fantasy, symptoms of post-Olympic tensions, degeneration, and unfulfilled obligations remain.

Credit Misallocation and Economic Growth in Vietnam

The legacy of non-performing loans and high opportunity cost of government financing of bank recapitalization impeded the efficiency of financial intermediation and are an important policy issue in Vietnam. This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the issue. An empirical analysis using corporate data indicates credit misallocation between state owned enterprises and private firms in Vietnam. On the theoretical side, a micro-founded banking model is embedded in a political economy setting to assess the factors determining the size of bank recapitalization and its effects on the efficiency of financial intermediation, economic growth and welfare. The analysis suggests that recapitalization depends on an array of factors, including the tightness of the government budget and the decision maker’s concern for the favored sector.

Autonomous Taxis and Public Health: High Cost or High Opportunity Cost?

Passenger vehicles are a major source of air pollution, exposure to which increases respiratory disease risk, amplifies life-threatening conditions and burdens the public purse. The negative externalities associated with these vehicles rise further when road accidents are considered. Almost all such accidents involving fatalities transpire when private users are in single vehicle incidents or collide with each other. Though autonomous vehicle technology can mitigate these effects, widespread adoption and proliferation demands cost competitiveness with the status quo; namely, personally owned and operated, conventional vehicles. Here we show that this prospect may - in a commercially owned and operated enterprise – be unlikely. Causal factors of relevance include low capacity utilization rates and impracticable profit expectations. In a single ridership ‘autonomous taxi’ model, we find capacity utilization rates would need to improve from 52 percent to 100 percent and profits lowered by 37 percent (from 27 cents to 17 cents on a per-mile basis) for autonomous taxis to offer fares that are comparable with personally owned, conventional vehicles. In a multiple ridership model, the affordance of these fares requires a 30 percent increase in vehicle occupancy (from 1.67 to 2.2) and a 75 percent increase (1.67 to 2.92) were even lower fares offered to incentivize shared, autonomous taxi use over personally owned, conventional vehicles. We conclude that consideration of the opportunity costs of driving are integral to the widespread adoption of a technology that may dramatically improve public health outcomes.

Industrial Symbiosis Systems: Promoting Carbon Emission Reduction Activities

The carbon emission problem in China needs to be solved urgently. Industrial symbiosis, as an effective means to improve resource efficiency, can better alleviate the carbon emission problem. Under such a circumstance, this paper regards an industrial symbiosis system as a collection of producers, consumers and decomposers, and analyzes the strategic selections and behavioral characteristics of their carbon emission reduction activities through a tripartite evolutionary game model, and then the effects of related parameters on the evolutionary stable strategies of stakeholders are discussed. The results demonstrate that: (1) the regular return and the rate of return determine the ability of stakeholders to undertake carbon reduction activities; (2) the initial willingness of stakeholders to participate will affect the evolutionary speed of the strategies; (3) a high opportunity cost reduces the inertia of stakeholders to carry out carbon emission reductions; (4) producers, consumers and decomposers can avoid “free rides” by signing agreements or adopting punitive measures.

Assessment of the impacts of Innovation Grants in Brazilian States

Goal: This article presents an assessment of the impacts of the “Research in Companies Support Program (PAPPE): Economical Subvention to Innovation”, in the decentralized modality, i.e., projects contracted in the states of the Brazilian federation. Considering the high opportunity cost of the PAPPE program, it was deemed important to evaluate how the financed projects impacted the three dimensions (economic, social and environmental) of sustainable development. Methodology: Study was based on literature review on innovation grants; interviews with one Finep technician and technicians from Fapes, Fapesc and Sebrae-PR; and documental research and analysis of 53 projects carried out in the states of Espírito Santo, Paraná and Santa Catarina, from 2009-2013. Descriptive analysis was conducted for comparing performance of the three states. Results: Under the economic dimension, the PAPPE program enhanced the ability of funding recipients to compete on a national level. However, there was no evidence of impact on the social and environmental dimensions. Limitations of the investigation: This research is restricted to three Brazilian states, chosen due to the homogeneity of project types and the interest of the researchers, with a focus on the state of Espírito Santo. Practical implications: Although both social and environmental dimensions are not explicit in the scope of the PAPPE program, the assessment of these dimensions should be included in the design and evaluation of any policy sponsored by public funding, since they are critical to the country.

Commercial Farms in Polish Metropolitan Areas: Changes in Production Factors

Both the literature and economic practice increasingly note differences in adaptation processes taking place in farms operating in the immediate proximity of large cities and other commercial farms. In areas where urbanisation and metropolisation processes are ongoing, agriculture not only faces a number of obstacles, but also many opportunities, and as a result processes of structural change are very rapid here. The identification of tendencies to changes in resources of farm production factors may constitute a basis for developing very useful research in Poland aimed at the introduction of appropriate development strategies for urban and peri-urban agriculture. The aim of this paper is to present directions of changes in production factors of commercial farms operating in six selected Polish metropolitan areas (MA). Detailed analyses covered 189 farms in six Polish metropolitan areas. The farms researched from 2004 to 2016 provided continuous data to the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). The comparative material used in the analyses covered 1665 farms outside of metropolitan areas. The analyses of commercial farms’ production capacity have shown that farms in MA inner zones (in immediate proximity of the city core) in 2004 possessed larger average resources of land, labour and capital. Between 2004 and 2016, production capacities of farms in the inner and outer zones of the MA evened out to a large extent. However, their average potential was still bigger compared to farms outside of metropolitan areas. Observation of ongoing changes has confirmed that the biggest percentage of farms reducing land, labour and capital resources was in the inner zone, which confirms the existence of barriers to their further development, i.e. limited supply of land and high opportunity cost of labour, among other things. It seems that these farms have to look for alternative development paths, namely they should focus on diversification and the development of non-agricultural services.

Endogenous Childlessness and Stages of Development

Although developing countries are characterized by high average fertility rates, they are as concerned by childlessness as developed countries. Beyond natural sterility, there are two main types of childlessness: one driven by poverty and another by the high opportunity cost of child-rearing. We measure the importance of the components of childlessness with a structural model of fertility and marriage. Deep parameters are identified using census data from 36 developing countries. As average education increases, poverty-driven childlessness first decreases to a minimum, and then the opportunity-driven part of childlessness increases. We show that neglecting the endogenous response of marriage and childlessness may lead to a poor understanding of the impact that social progress, such as universal primary education, may have on completed fertility. The same holds for family planning, closing the gender pay gap, and the eradication of child mortality.