Sublime

Richard Zeckhauser in his famous essay, “Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable.”

Professor Howard Raiffa’s maximum bid of others (or MBOO, pronounced “maboo”) analysis, which captures the fundamental trade-off in graphical form.

“This reform will not pass. Those who stand to lose will fight harder than those who stand to gain.” “Each of them thinks the other’s concessions are less painful. They are both wrong, of course. It’s just the asymmetry of losses.” “They would find it easier to renegotiate the agreement if they realized the pie was actually expanding. They’re not a

An even weaker hypothesis is that people don’t even mind being in the very first occupied row as long as the rows immediately behind them are filled, so they are not conspicuously down front by themselves.

Our task now is to give specificity to the tradeoffs. For simplicity, let the sources of utility be additive. This is to say that an individual’s total utility from a particular public preference equals his intrinsic utility from society’s decision plus his reputational utility from the engendered social reactions plus the expressive utility he der

the learning dynamics were overwhelmingly likely to be chaotic. That is, the players never coordinated on an equilibrium; instead, they chased each other around the space of possible strategies in an unpredictable manner.

However, I also share Slovic’s belief that widespread fears, even if they are unreasonable, should not be ignored by policy makers. Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.

When a tragedy of the commons is involved, the standard remedy is coercion, agreed to by all.