Ave Maria School of Law

Whether social media platforms increase well-being can be explored from multiple angles. Three empirical studies raise corresponding puzzles, with implications for valuation, choice, and well-being in general. The first finds that people are willing to pay far less to use social media platforms than they would demand to stop using them. The second finds that people lose welfare from using Facebook, and that Facebook users become more anxious and depressed, but that even after experiencing a good month without Facebook, they would demand a significant amount of money to stop using the platform for an additional month. The third finds that while many people would demand a significant amount of money to stop using Instagram and Tik Tok, they would also be willing to pay to eliminate Instagram and Tik Tok from their community. Each of the three puzzles has a plausible solution, but we do not yet know the ground truth. A reasonable conclusion is that people would demand a lot of money to be excluded from social media networks, which suggests that inclusion confers significant benefits, contingent on their existence – but that if social media networks did not exist, many users would be better off. This conclusion has broad implications; it suggests that people often spend time or money on goods whose existence they deplore. The three puzzles offer broad lessons for choice and welfare, and for how to think about their relationship.

In the current era, product differentiation is increasing; it is often fueled by big data and artificial intelligence (AI). Whereas product differentiation is generally welfare enhancing when consumers are informed and fully rational, such differentiation might reduce welfare when consumers suffer from misperceptions, either because of a lack of information or because of behavioral biases. We show that the positive and normative implications of product differentiation depend on whether consumers over or underestimate the benefits from some products. In particular, overestimation of the benefits is a potential source of significant welfare losses. We also study sellers’ incentives to promote, or combat, misperception. Our analysis can inform policymakers who are debating regulation that can make product differentiation more difficult (or easier), especially when the differentiation is instigated by AI algorithms powered by big data.

Raynaud’s phenomenon (RP) is a condition that causes decreased blood flow to areas perfused by small blood vessels (e.g., fingers, toes). In severe cases, ulceration, gangrene, and loss of fingers may occur. Most treatments focus on inducing vasorelaxation in affected areas by the way of pharmaceuticals. Recently, animal studies have shown that vasorelaxation can be induced by non-coherent blue light (wavelength ~ 430–460 nm) through the actions of melanopsin, a photoreceptive opsin protein encoded by the OPN4 gene. To study this effect in humans, a reliable phototherapy device (PTD) is needed. We outline the construction of a PTD to be used in studying blue light effects on Raynaud’s patients. Our design addresses user safety, calibration, electromagnetic compatibility/interference (EMC/EMI), and techniques for measuring physiological responses (temperature sensors, laser Doppler flow sensors, infrared thermal imaging of the hands). We tested our device to ensure (1) safe operating conditions, (2) predictable, user-controlled irradiance output levels, (3) an ability for measuring physiological responses, and (4) features necessary to enable a double-blinded crossover study for a clinical trial. We also include in the Methods an approved research protocol utilizing our device that may serve as a starting point for clinical study. We introduced a reliable PTD for studying the effects of blue light therapy for patients suffering from Raynaud’s phenomenon and showed that our device is safe and reliable and includes the required measurement vectors for tracking treatment effects throughout the duration of a clinical study.

The practice of consuming wild fauna in Brazil is both culturally and socioeconomically questionable. Wild animals and their byproducts are sought for nutritional, medicinal, and/or supernatural reasons, with some taxa (e.g., songbirds) being kept as pets. This practice is concentrated in traditional and rural communities, as well as the rural exodus populations in large urban centers, maintained both by cultural preferences and for their role in food safety in part of the rural exodus community. A total of 564 taxa are known to be sold in wet markets in Brazil, with birds, fish, and mammals being the most commonly listed. There is great zoonotic outbreak potential in this consumption chain given the diversity of species involved (with several listed being known reservoirs of zoonotic pathogens), invasion of wild environments for hunting, unsanitary processing of carcasses, and consumption of most/all biotopes of the animal, as well as the creation of favorable conditions to cross-species pathogen transmission. Given its socioeconomic situation and the global trends in disease emergence, there is a risk of the future emergence of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in Brazil through wildlife consumption.

This article outlines benefit-cost criteria for nudges and behavioral norms for a wide range of policy situations. The principal benefits from well-designed policies usually derive from promoting efficient behaviors, but counterpart costs may also be generated by discouraging efficient behaviors. The distinguishing economic characteristic of nudges is not only that they are less intrusive interventions that nudge rather than mandate behavior, but that they exploit additional policy dimensions other than financial incentives. Policies utilizing financial incentives have a cost advantage over nudges to the extent that they involve transfers, which are not net social costs. Failure to understand this cost distinction has led to overestimation of the cost-effectiveness of nudges compared to financial incentives. Financial incentives are flexible and can be varied continuously on a single dimension. Nudges usually involve indivisible components, but their stringency sometimes can be varied by utilizing nudges on multiple policy dimensions.

The legal profession is among the least diverse in the United States. Given continuing issues of systemic racism, the central position that the justice system occupies in society, and the vital role that lawyers play in that system, it is incumbent upon legal professionals to identify and remedy the causes of this lack of diversity. This Article seeks to understand how the bar examination—the final hurdle to entering the profession— contributes to this dearth of diversity. Using publicly available data, we analyze whether the ethnic makeup of a law school’s entering class correlates to the school’s first-time bar passage rates on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). We find that higher proportions of Black and Hispanic students in a law school’s entering class are associated with lower first-time bar passage rates for that school in its reported UBE jurisdictions three years later. This effect persists after controlling for other potentially causal factors like undergraduate grade-point average (UGPA), law school admission test (LSAT) score, geographic region, or law school tier. Moreover, the results are statistically robust at a p-value of 0.01 (indicating just a 1% chance that the results are due to random variation in the data). Because these are school-level results, they may not fully account for relevant factors identifiable only in student-level data. As a result, we argue that follow-up study using data relating to individual students is necessary to fully understand why the UBE produces racially and ethnically disparate results.

Background Public Health England has concluded that e-cigarettes are much safer than cigarettes for the user and for secondhand exposures, but it has not reached a definitive conclusion regarding pregnancy risks. How people perceive the risks to others is less well understood. Methods This study uses an online UK sample of 1041 adults to examine perceived e-cigarette risks to others and during pregnancy. The survey examines relative risk beliefs of e-cigarettes compared to cigarettes and the percentage reduction in harm provided by e-cigarettes. Results A majority of the sample believes that secondhand exposure to e-cigarette vapors poses less risk than secondhand smoke from cigarettes, but almost two-fifths of the sample equate the secondhand risks from e-cigarettes to those from cigarettes. There is somewhat greater perception of e-cigarette risks during pregnancy compared to beliefs regarding secondhand risks of vaping. About two-fifths of the population believe that e-cigarettes are less risky than cigarettes during pregnancy. Respondents believe that e-cigarettes reduce the harm to others by 39% and the harm to babies by 36%. Conclusion There is a general sense that e-cigarettes pose less risk than cigarettes, but there is a need for further risk communication regarding comparative e-cigarette risks.

Policies to address the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) require a balancing of the health risk reductions and the costs of economic dislocations. Application of the value of a statistical life (VSL) to monetize COVID-19 deaths produces a U.S. mortality cost estimate of $1.4 trillion for deaths in the first half of 2020. This article presents worldwide COVID-19 costs for over 100 countries. The total global mortality cost through July 2, 2020 is$3.5 trillion. The United States accounts for 25% of the deaths, but 41% of the mortality cost. Adjustments for the shorter life expectancy and lower income of the victims substantially reduces the estimated monetized losses, but may raise fundamental equity concerns. Morbidity effects of COVID-19 affect many more patients than do the disease’s mortality risks. Consideration of the morbidity effects increase the expected health losses associated with COVID-19 illnesses by 10% to 40%.

This article presents the first meta-analysis documenting the extent of publication selection biases in stated preference estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL). Stated preference studies fail to overcome the publication biases that affect much of the VSL literature. Such biases account for approximately 90% of the mean value of published VSL estimates in this subset of the literature. The bias is greatest for the largest estimates, possibly because the high-income labor market and stated preference estimates from the USA serve as an anchor for the VSL in other higher income countries. Estimates from lower-income countries exhibit less bias but remain unreliable for benefit-cost analysis. Unlike labor market estimates of the VSL, there is no evidence that any subsample of VSL estimates is free of significant publication selection biases. Although stated preference studies often provide the most readily accessible country-specific VSL estimates, a preferable approach to monetizing mortality risk benefits is to draw on income-adjusted estimates from labor market studies in the USA that use Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries risk data. These estimates lack publication selection effects as well as the limitations that are endemic to stated preference methods.

Production efficiency and product quality need to be addressed simultaneously to ensure the reliability of large scale additive manufacturing. Specifically, print surface temperature plays a critical role in determining the quality characteristics of the product. Moreover, heat transfer via conduction as a result of spatial correlation between locations on the surface of large and complex geometries necessitates the employment of more robust methodologies to extract and monitor the data. In this paper, we propose a framework for real-time data extraction from thermal images as well as a novel method for controlling layer time during the printing process. A FLIR thermal camera captures and stores the stream of images from the print surface temperature while the Thermwood Large Scale Additive Manufacturing (LSAM) machine is printing components. A set of digital image processing tasks were performed to extract the thermal data. Separate regression models based on real-time thermal imaging data are built on each location on the surface to predict the associated temperatures. Subsequently, a control method is proposed to find the best time for printing the next layer given the predictions. Finally, several scenarios based on the cooling dynamics of surface structure were defined and analyzed, and the results were compared to the current fixed layer time policy. It was concluded that the proposed method can significantly increase the efficiency by reducing the overall printing time while preserving the quality.

The United States is associated with the idea of religious liberty. The late Judge John Noonan went so far as to describe the free exercise of religion, and here he had in mind the idea of inscribing in fundamental law an ideal of religious freedom, “as an American invention.” Today, however, there is much discussion about a crisis of religious liberty. Professor Gerard Bradley has recently commented that “[f]or the first time in American history, it has become respectable to publicly oppose religious liberty and its supreme value in our polity. This unprecedented turn is ominous. It will not only diminish our constitutional law, it will remap our common life, for religious liberty has always been a linchpin of our political culture” (https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/04/50836/). The stakes here are, of course, quite high. It is helpful, then, to try to understand and appreciate our history of religious liberty and to assess the current situation. Steven Waldman’s book is an effort to do just that, and it is largely successful. Waldman, an award-winning journalist and the co-founder of Beliefnet, makes a contribution to understanding the American idea of religious liberty. He does this through a fast-paced account of (as his subtitle states) our “long, bloody, and ongoing struggle for religious freedom.”

This symposium issue of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty addresses wide-ranging policy issues pertaining to risk regulation and the economic underpinnings of these efforts. One such intervention consists of policies to address informational market failures. Whether new information has a positive value is less obvious than economists often assume. When more stringent regulations are required, the structure and evaluation of these efforts often hinges on the value of a statistical life, or the VSL. This symposium reports estimates of the utility functions that generate these local risk-money tradeoffs as well as new estimates of the VSL using both stated-preference and revealed-preference approaches. Articles also explore the behavioral factors that affect VSL estimates, the effect of health risks on product prices, and how income taxation affects stated-preference survey elicitations of the VSL. The symposium reports estimates of the VSL for almost 200 countries as well as the VSL levels used by U.S. government agencies in analyses of over 100 government regulations from 1985 to 2018.

This article reviews economic evidence on health-dependent utility functions and presents new estimates of utility functions for cancer. Estimates of health-dependent utility functions have found that mild adverse health impacts can be treated as monetary equivalents. Severe health consequences also reduce utility levels but have an additional effect of altering the structure of utility functions by reducing the marginal utility of income. The implications of past studies are often misleading when they fail to account for income losses and medical expenses associated with serious ailments. This article’s estimates of the structure of utility functions for cancer indicate a substantially lower marginal utility of income at any given income level. This result is consistent with the welfare consequences of other severe health effects, which impose harms that are not tantamount to a monetary loss.

This article seeks to reveal, conceptualize, and analyze a trend in the development of the retributive theory of punishment since the beginning of the 21st century. We term this trend “retributarianism.” It is reflected in the emergence of retributive approaches that through expanding the concepts of censure and culpability extend the relevant time-frame for assessing the deserved punishment beyond the sentencing moment. These retributarian approaches are characterized by the individualization of retributivism. On one hand, retributarianism shares with classic retributivism the rhetoric of justice, a focus on the moral evaluation of the severity of the offense, and the primary importance ascribed to maintaining proportionality. On the other hand, it shares with utilitarianism the possibility of taking into account, in addition to the severity of the offense, the offender’s personal circumstances, with a future-oriented perspective that also considers developments subsequent to the commission of the offense. This article analyzes the emergence of retributarianism, suggests possible explanations for its development, and assesses its possible implications for penal theory and policy.

This article provides an experimental analysis of two-armed bandit problems that have a different structure in which the first unsuccessful outcome leads to termination of the game. It differs from a conventional two-armed bandit problem in that there is no opportunity to alter behavior after an unsuccessful outcome. Introducing the risk of death into a sequential decision problem alters the structure of the problem. Even though play ends after an unsuccessful outcome, Bayesian learning after successful outcomes has a potential function in this class of two-armed bandit problems. Increasing uncertainty boosts the chance of long-term survival since ambiguous probabilities of survival are increased more after each successful outcome. In the independent choice experiments, a slim majority of participants displayed a preference for greater risk ambiguity. Particularly in the interdependent choice experiments, participants were overly deterred by ambiguity. For both independent and interdependent choices, there were several dimensions on which participants displayed within session rationality. However, participants failed to learn and improve their strategy over a series of rounds, which is consistent with evidence of bounded rationality in other challenging games.

There are a growing number of general theories of contract law and of other doctrinal areas. These theories are vastly ambitious in their aims. This article explores the nature of these claims, and the motivations for offering such theories, while considering the challenges to success. It is in the nature of theorizing to seek general categories, including doctrinal categories, and to try to discover insights that hold across those categories. However, differences both within a doctrinal area and across legal systems undermine the case for universal and general theories. Also, unjustifiably general theories may distract us from developing properly contextual legal rules, and might even have the unintended effect of legitimating unjust rules.

Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation. Four Perspectives – II - Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation. By Charles C. Camosy . Foreword by Melinda Henneberger . Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015. xiv + 207 pages. $22.00. - Volume 44 Issue 1 - D. Brian Scarnecchia

U.S. labor market estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) were the first revealed preference estimates of the VSL in the literature and continue to constitute the majority of such market estimates. The VSL estimates in U.S. studies consequently may have established a reference point for the estimates that researchers analyzing data from other countries are willing to report and that journals are willing to publish. This article presents the first comparison of the publication selection biases in U.S. and international estimates using a sample of 68 VSL studies with over 1000 VSL estimates throughout the world. Publication selection biases vary across the VSL distribution and are greater for the larger VSL estimates. The estimates of publication selection biases distinguish between U.S. and international studies as well as between government and non-government data sources. Empirical estimates that correct for the impact of these biases reduce the VSL estimates, particularly for studies based on international data. This pattern of publication bias effects is consistent with international studies relying on U.S. estimates as an anchor for the levels of reasonable estimates. U.S. estimates based on the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries constitute the only major set of VSL studies for which there is no evidence of statistically significant publication selection effects. Adjusting a baseline bias-adjusted U.S. VSL estimate of $9.6 million using estimates of the income elasticity of the VSL may be a sounder approach for generating international estimates of the VSL than relying on direct estimates from international studies.

Objective: This study examined the mediating role of personal goal facilitation through work (PGFW), defined as perceptions of the extent to which one's job facilitates the attainment of one's personal goals, in the association between psychosocial job characteristics and psychological distress and job-related well-being. Material and methods: Questionnaire data from 217 nurses (84% female, with a mean age of 42.7 years, SD = 7.2) were analyzed. Participants completed the following measures: the Leiden Quality of Work Questionnaire for Nurses, Workplace Goal Facilitation Inventory, Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey, and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (short version). A cross-sectional study design was applied. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted. Results: The results indicated that unfavorable psychosocial job characteristics (high demands, low control, and low social support) were associated with lower PGFW. Furthermore, personal goal facilitation through work explained significant additional variance (from 2% to 11%) in psychological distress (somatic complaints and emotional exhaustion) and job-related well-being (personal accomplishment, job satisfaction, and work engagement), controlling for demographic indicators and psychosocial job characteristics. Finally, the results provided support for the mediating effects of PGFW between all psychosocial job characteristics and all outcomes, except in the case of depersonalization. Conclusions: This study suggests that hindered personal goal facilitation may be a mechanism through which psychosocial job characteristics have a negative impact on employees' well-being.