Conflict of interest: law enforcement and conflictology

The subject. The article is devoted to conflictology as one of the most relevant, almost significant, debatable problems in law theory, legal sciences, political science, philosophy, psychology and economics. The author analyzes specific examples of conflicts of interest in various corruption spheres and manifestations, for example, in the sphere of participation of economic actors in the procurement announced by state and municipal authorities.The purpose of the article is to identify the nature of conflicts of interest as the basis of corruption.The methodology. The author uses comparisons of common and private, cause and effect, patterns and randomness, content and form, essence and phenomenon, the transition of quantity into quality, as well as the methods of sociology and psychology.The main results, scope of application. The article analyzes the relationship between corruption and nepotism. The article discusses legal and moral ways to prevent conflict, the role of ethical standards in conflict prevention, regulatory framework for preventing and settling them, the ratio of conflict of interest and employee qualifications, balance of material and personal interest, Commissions to prevent conflicts of interest, guaranteeing the role of writing notice of a conflict of interest, Features of the notification procedure, moral means of preventing and resolve conflicts of interest. Exclusively legal methods are insufficient to prevent and eliminate conflicts of interest and corruption-related risks. A combination of legal and moral measures is necessary, and most importantly, the exclusion of kinship and other forms of nepotism in the formation of government bodies and the appointment of officials, the hiring of state and municipal employees. It is necessary to exclude formalism from the institution of competitive selection of civil servants.Conclusions. The elimination of the contradictions between some federal anti-corruption laws has much less effect on the state of corruption in the state than the flourishing nepotism. The exercise of official functions takes place in the form of law enforcement: if there is no application of the law – there is no corruption. The main emphasis should be directed to the process of forming the apparatus of state and municipal authorities, employees of state and municipal institutions, primarily in the educational sphere, on which the upbringing of new generations of employees depends, the steady observance of high professional and moral requirements imposed on state and municipal employees and teachers in schools and universities.

What is Happiness? Why is Happiness Important?

The (net) happiness (or welfare) of an individual is the excess of her positive affective feelings over negative ones. This subjective definition of happiness is more consistent with common usage and analytically more useful. Over the past century or so, both psychology and economics has gone through the anti-subjectivism revolution (behaviorism in psychology and ordinalism in economics) but has come back to largely accept subjectivism (cognitive psychology and recent interest of economists on happiness issues).

IDB Behavioral Economics Group: Project Highlights of the Last Decade

The IDB Behavioral Economics Group is an interdepartmental working group on behavioral economics. For nearly a decade, armed with the tools and insights offered by psychology and economics, the IDB has been partnering with local and national governments in Latin America and the Caribbean to promote knowledge related to individual and collective decision-making in the region. Through this work, we hope to serve our countries better and continue improving peoples' lives.

Quantifying the contribution of individual variation in timing to delay-discounting

Delay-discounting studies in neuroscience, psychology, and economics have been mostly focused on concepts of self-control, reward evaluation, and discounting. Another important relationship to consider is the link between intertemporal choice and time perception. We presented 50 college students with timing tasks on the range of seconds to minutes and intertemporal-choice tasks on both the time-scale of seconds and of days. We hypothesized that individual differences in time perception would influence decisions about short experienced delays but not long delays. While we found some evidence that individual differences in internal clock speed account for some unexplained variance between choices across time-horizons, overall our findings suggest a nominal contribution of the altered sense of time in intertemporal choice.

Black Boxes

Textbooks and other popular venues commonly present science as a progressive “brick-by-brick” accumulation of knowledge and facts. Despite its hallowed history and familiar ring, this depiction is nowadays rejected by most specialists. Then why are books and articles, written by these same experts, actively promoting such a distorted characterization? The short answer is that no better alternative is available. There currently are two competing models of the scientific enterprise: reductionism and antireductionism. Neither provides an accurate depiction of the productive interaction between knowledge and ignorance, supplanting the old metaphor of the “wall” of knowledge. This book explores an original conception of the nature and advancement of science. The proposed shift brings attention to a prominent, albeit often neglected, construct—the black box—which underlies a well-oiled technique for incorporating a productive role of ignorance and failure into the acquisition of empirical knowledge. What is a black box? How does it work? How is it constructed? How does one determine what to include and what to leave out? What role do boxes play in contemporary scientific practice? By detailing some fascinating episodes in the history of biology, psychology, and economics, Nathan revisits foundational questions about causation, explanation, emergence, and progress, showing how the insights of both reductionism and antireductionism can be reconciled into a fresh and exciting approach to science.

Analysis of Multiple Correspondence Against Crimes in Sleman Regency

Crime is bad behavior, from social and religious norms and it makes psychology and economics harm. Stealing, ill-treatment, embezzlement, deception, deception/embezzlement, and adultery are the most crime in the last 9 months. Therefore, for identify the type of crime in the community we need a method to see the tendency of a category using multiple correspondence analysis methods. Analysis of multiple correspondences is one of the descriptive statistics that use to describe a pattern of relationships from contingency’s table with the aim of finding liability between categories. The results of the correspondence analysis are that the tendency of criminal suspect to be related to this types of crime of stealing and ill-treatment to be done by students or students less than 25 years old and were male, suspect of deception and adultery tends to be done by women over 40 years old and does not work, and suspect of embezzlement tends by workers and their ages around 25 to 40 years. The liability of the relation between criminal incidents and the types of crime is the types of crime of ill-treatment and adultery that are most prone to occur in shops with vulnerable hours 00:00-05:59 and 18:00-23:59.

A regularized hidden Markov model for analyzing the ‘hot shoe’ in football

We propose a penalized likelihood approach in hidden Markov models (HMMs) to perform automated variable selection. To account for a potential large number of covariates, which also may be substantially correlated, we consider the elastic net penalty containing LASSO and ridge as special cases. By quadratically approximating the non-differentiable penalty, we ensure that the likelihood can be maximized numerically. The feasibility of our approach is assessed in simulation experiments. As a case study, we examine the ‘hot hand’ effect, whose existence is highly debated in different fields, such as psychology and economics. In the present work, we investigate a potential ‘hot shoe’ effect for the performance of penalty takers in (association) football, where the (latent) states of the HMM serve for the underlying form of a player.

Historical Context of Behavioral Economics

Behavioral economics, at broad level, superimpose many areas including Psychology and Economics. Behavioral economics by all means enhances the explanatory power of Economics as it provides it with a firm and more rational psychological basis. During the previous 20 years, many studies have explored different aspects of behavioral economics leading to introduction of the respective principles that pertain to human behavior. This article intends to provide an introduction to behavioral economics in its historical context. It also investigates the gaps that lie in the broad spectrum of behavioral economics.

Gambling Researchers’ Use and Views of Open Science Principles and Practices: A Brief Report

Scientists across disciplines have begun to implement “open science” principles and practices, which are designed to enhance the quality, transparency, and replicability of scientific research. Yet, studies examining the use of open science practices in social science fields such as psychology and economics show that awareness and use of such practices often is low. In gambling studies research, no studies to date have empirically investigated knowledge of and use of open science practices. In the present study, we collected survey data about awareness and use of open science practices from 86 gambling studies research stakeholders who had attended a major international gambling studies conference in May 2019. We found that—as hypothesized—a minority of gambling research stakeholders reported: 1) either some or extensive experience using open science research practices in general, and 2) either some or regular experience using specific open science practices, including study pre-registration, open materials/code, open data, and pre-print archiving. Most respondents indicated that replication was important for all studies in gambling research, and that genetic, neuroscience, and lab-based game characteristic studies were areas most in need of replication. Our results have important implications for open science education initiatives and for contemporary research methodology in gambling studies.

Information Theory for Agents in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, and Economics

This review covers some of the central relationships between artificial intelligence, psychology, and economics through the lens of information theory, specifically focusing on formal models of decision-theory. In doing so we look at a particular approach that each field has adopted and how information theory has informed the development of the ideas of each field. A key theme is expected utility theory, its connection to information theory, and the Bayesian approach to decision-making and forms of (bounded) rationality. What emerges from this review is a broadly unified formal perspective derived from three very different starting points that reflect the unique principles of each field. Each of the three approaches reviewed can, in principle at least, be implemented in a computational model in such a way that, with sufficient computational power, they could be compared with human abilities in complex tasks. However, a central critique that can be applied to all three approaches was first put forward by Savage in The Foundations of Statistics and recently brought to the fore by the economist Binmore: Bayesian approaches to decision-making work in what Savage called `small worlds’ but cannot work in `large worlds’. This point, in various different guises, is central to some of the current debates about the power of artificial intelligence and its relationship to human-like learning and decision-making. Recent work on artificial intelligence has gone some way to bridging this gap but significant questions still need to be answered in all three fields in order to make progress on these problems.