Public Health Confronts Modernity in the Shadow of the Pandemic

Empirical science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed public health. Improvement in nutrition and living conditions were the driving forces, linked to basic sanitation. The principles of public health also proved highly effective in prevention of chronic disease, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. However, the dominant force in biomedicine has become genomics and “precision medicine,” both of which ignore the role of environmental exposures, and focus on individual, not collective risk. Genetic determinism and technological solutions have narrowed the scope of research aimed at improving population health, and reduced the benefits that biomedical science and public health could provide. The COVID-19 pandemic is the same story in bold print.

Poisson size-biased Lindley distribution and its applications

In this paper, a new model for count data is introduced by compounding the Poisson distribution with size-biased three-parameter Lindley distribution. Statistical properties, such as reliability, hazard rate, reverse hazard rate, Mills ratio, moments, shewness, kurtosis, moment genrating function, probability generating function and order statistics, have been discussed. Moreover, the collective risk model is discussed by considering the proposed distrubution as the primary distribution and the expoential and Erlang distributions as the secondary ones. Parameter estimation is done using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Finally a real dataset is discussed to demonstrate the suitability and applicability of the proposed distribution in modeling count dataset.

A Sustainable environmental change and ESG initiatives by the manufacturing and others service Industries during COVID19 Pandemic

Covid-19 has improved the economy’s ESG plan. The ESG rating of an industry is crucial for stakeholders and will influence future business practices. ESG is commonly understood to refer to a set of criteria for making long-term investments in the areas of the environment, social welfare, and governance. Climate change is a systemic concern, and governments, companies, and society are increasingly determined to meet it. Climate change, according to the ESG, is the world’s most complicated challenge, posing collective risk and ambiguity to society. The impact of ESG elements and climate risk in the insurance business is investigated in this research. The research will also look into how insurers are responding to climate change. The research will also look into how insurers are pursuing climate-friendly activities such as creating green jobs, supporting socially responsible investing, and prioritizing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and commercial sustainability in their operations. As a result, the study’s major recommendation is that potential clients and insurers increase their horizons of ESG risk awareness.

Sanctions and international interaction improve cooperation to avert climate change

Imposing sanctions on non-compliant parties to international agreements is advocated as a remedy for international cooperation failure. Nevertheless, sanctions are costly, and rational choice theory predicts their ineffectiveness in solving cooperation problems. Empirically, sanctions were shown to increase cooperation substantially in some cultural areas but to be detrimental in others. We test sanctions' effectiveness experimentally in international collective-risk social dilemmas simulating efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change. We involve individuals from cultural areas where sanctions were shown to have different effectiveness: Russia and Germany. Here we show that, while this result still holds nationally, international interaction backed by sanctions is beneficial. Cooperation by low cooperator groups increases relative to national cooperation and converges to the levels of high cooperators. Moreover, international groups interacting under sanctions contribute more to catastrophe prevention than what is prescribed by the group payoff-maximizing solution. This behavior signals a strong preference for protection against collective risks.

Evidence from a long-term experiment that collective risks change social norms and promote cooperation

Social norms can help solve pressing societal challenges, from mitigating climate change to reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Despite their relevance, how norms shape cooperation among strangers remains insufficiently understood. Influential theories also suggest that the level of threat faced by different societies plays a key role in the strength of the norms that cultures evolve. Still little causal evidence has been collected. Here we deal with this dual challenge using a 30-day collective-risk social dilemma experiment to measure norm change in a controlled setting. We ask whether a looming risk of collective loss increases the strength of cooperative social norms that may avert it. We find that social norms predict cooperation, causally affect behavior, and that higher risk leads to stronger social norms that are more resistant to erosion when the risk changes. Taken together, our results demonstrate the causal effect of social norms in promoting cooperation and their role in making behavior resilient in the face of exogenous change.

Sanctions and international interaction improve cooperation to avert climate change

Imposing sanctions on noncompliant parties to international agreements is often advocated as a remedy for international cooperation failure, notably in climate agreements. We provide an experimental test of this conjecture in a collective-risk social dilemma simulating the effort to avoid catastrophic climate change. We involve groups of participants from two cultural areas that were shown to achieve different levels of cooperation nationally when peer-level sanctions were available. Here we show that, while this result still holds nationally, international interaction backed by sanctions is overall beneficial. Cooperation by low cooperator groups increases in comparison with national cooperation and converges to the cooperation levels of high cooperation groups. While such an increase is small without sanctions, it becomes sizable when sanctions are imposed. Revealing or hiding counterparts’ nationality does not affect results. Our study supports the proposal to use sanctions to support international cooperation to avert collective risk such as climate change.

Sanctions and international interaction improve cooperation to avert climate change

Imposing sanctions on noncompliant parties to international agreements is often advocated as a remedy for international cooperation failure, notably in climate agreements. We provide an experimental test of this conjecture in a collective-risk social dilemma simulating the effort to avoid catastrophic climate change. We involve groups of participants from two cultural areas that were shown to achieve different levels of cooperation nationally when peer-level sanctions were available. Here we show that, while this result still holds nationally, international interaction backed by sanctions is overall beneficial. Cooperation by low cooperator groups increases significantly in comparison with national cooperation and converges to the cooperation levels of high cooperation groups. While the increase is only marginally significant without sanctions, it becomes sizable when sanctions are imposed. When sanctions are available, individuals are willing to cooperate above the level that would maximize expected payoffs. Revealing or hiding counterparts’ nationality does not affect results.