A concise guide to ambivalence, from Adam and Eve (to eat the apple or not?) to Hamlet (to be or not?) to globalization (e pluribus unum or not?).Why is it so hard to make up our minds? Adam and Eve set the template: Do we or don't we eat the apple? They chose, half-heartedly, and nothing was ever the same again. With this book, Kenneth Weisbrode offers a crisp, literate, and provocative introd…
"Eleventh Ernst Str?ungmann Forum held June 19-24, 2011, Frankfurt am Main."How do we make decisions? Conventional decision theory tells us only which behavioral choices we ought to make if we follow certain axioms. In real life, however, our choices are governed by cognitive mechanisms shaped over evolutionary time through the process of natural selection. Evolution has created strong biases i…
About 2.5 billion adults, just over half the world's adult population, lack bank accounts. If we are to realize the goal of extending banking and other financial services to this vast "unbanked" population, we need to consider not only such product innovations as microfinance and mobile banking but also issues of data accuracy, impact assessment, risk mitigation, technology adaptation, financia…
Experts analyze the recent emphasis on central communication as an additional policy and accountability device.In recent years central bankers have placed new emphasis on communication with financial markets and the general public. They have done this not only through the traditional channel of monetary policy pronouncements but also by increasing the quantity of information they make public. Y…
An examination of the debates on European Central Bank monetary policy, focusing on issues of transparency, credibility, and accountability and the effect of the ECB's decentralized structure.The adoption of the euro in 1999 by 11 member states of the European Union created a single currency area second in economic size only to the United States. The euro zone's monetary policy is now set by th…
How people make decisions in an era of too much information and fake news. Humans originally evolved in a world of few choices. Prehistoric, preindustrial, and predigital eras required fewer decisions than today's all-access, always-on world of too much information. Economists have largely discarded the idea that agents act rationally and the market follows suit. It seems that no matter how sma…
An examination of the cognitive tools that the mind uses to grapple with uncertainty in the real world.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"An interdisciplinary exploration of the economics of wine, drawing on a variety of academic literatures"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Investigations of how the global Cold War shaped national scientific and technological practices in fields from biomedicine to rocket science.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Annotation Japan's financial institutions and policy underwent remarkable change in the past decade. The country began the 1990s with a heavily regulated financial system managed by an unchallenged Ministry of Finance and ended the decade with a Big Bang financial market reform, a complete restructuring of its regulatory financial institutions, and an independent central bank. These reforms hav…