Contributions published at Theory of Economic Policy and Non-Market Economics (Bruno Frey)

The official intention of the UNESCO World Heritage List is to protect the global heritage. However, the existing List is highly imbalanced according to countries and continents. Historical reasons, such as historical GDP, population, and number of years of high civilization, have a significant impact on being included on the List. In addition, economic and political factors unrelated to the value of heritage, such as rent seeking by bureaucrats and politicians, the size of the tourist sector, the importance of media, the degree of federalism, and membership in the UN Security Council, influence the composition of the List.

During the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg on her maiden voyage. Two hours and 40 minutes later she sank, resulting in the loss of 1,501 lives—more than two-thirds of her 2,207 passengers and crew. This remains one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history and by far the most famous. For social scientists, evidence about how people behaved as the Titanic sunk offers a quasi-natural field experiment to explore behavior under extreme conditions of life and death. A common assumption is that in such situations, self-interested reactions will predominate and social cohesion is expected to disappear. However, empirical evidence on the extent to which people in the throes of a disaster react with self-regarding or with other-regarding behavior is scanty. The sinking of the Titanic posed a life-or-death situation for its passengers. The Titanic carried only 20 lifeboats, which could accommodate about half the people aboard, and deck officers exacerbated the shortage by launching lifeboats that were partially empty. Failure to secure a seat in a lifeboat virtually guaranteed death. We have collected individual-level data on the passengers and crew on the Titanic, which allow us to analyze some specific questions: Did physical strength (being male and in prime age) or social status (being a first- or second-class passenger) raise the survival chance? Was it favorable for survival to travel alone or in company? Does one's role or function (being a crew member or a passenger) affect the probability of survival? Do social norms, such as "Women and children first!" have any effect? Does nationality affect the chance of survival? We also explore whether the time from impact to sinking might matter by comparing the sinking of the Titanic over nearly three hours to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, which took only 18 minutes from when the torpedo hit the ship.

Am Beispiel des Untergangs der Lusitania und der Titanic wird analysiert, ob und in welchem Maße finanzielle und physische Macht sowie soziale Normen über Leben und Tod entscheiden. In einem quasi-natürlichen Experiment werden multivariate Probit-Schätzungen von öffentlich verfügbaren Sekundärdaten der Schiffsuntergänge durchgeführt. Die Analyse kommt zum Ergebnis, dass es im Wesentlichen von der Zeitspanne zwischen der Beschädigung des Schiffes und seinem Untergang abhängt, welche Rolle physische Stärke, gesellschaftlicher Status oder soziale Normen in lebensbedrohenden Situationen spielen. In zeitlich eng begrenzten Extremsituationen verdrängen Angst und Stress wertbezogenes, rationales Handeln. Es kommt zu einem rücksichtslosen Kampf ums eigene Überleben. Bleibt jedoch in Empfinden und Wahrnehmung der Betroffenen ein größerer Zeitraum bis zum endgültigen Versinken des Schiffes, bestimmen in stärkerem Maße soziale und ethische Werte das Verhalten der Menschen.

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical “Tullock Challenges”. The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, or to some extent Google. Both innovations lead to strong incentives by the governments to manipulate the policy consequences. In general “What is important, will be manipulated by the government”. To restrain government manipulation one has to turn to Constitutional Economics and increase the possibilities for direct popular participation and federalism, or introduce random mechanisms.

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Many governments as well as terrorist experts see the use of military and police forces as the only way to effectively counter terrorism. The most effective negative sanctions are considered to be military strikes, aggressive actions (including kidnapping and killing) against individuals known or suspected of being terrorists, or against persons supporting and harboring terrorists. Overt and covert military and paramilitary action is also thought advisable to pre-empt and prevent actions by terrorist groups, as well as against states suspected of hosting or tolerating terrorists. This paper argues that decentralization constitutes a powerful antidote as it strongly reduces the incentives for terrorists to attack and because the expected damage suffered is much smaller than in a centralized society. It moreover strengthens society, as economic, political and social decentralization (or polycentricity) is an essential element of a free and vigorous society. This in turn makes a society less vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Indeed, terrorism has no chance of success against a society that actively guards its fundamental liberal institutions, of which decentralized decision-making forms an essential part.

Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causal forces are the rankings mania, increased division of labor in research, intense publication pressure, academic fraud, dilution of the concept of “university”, and inadequate organizational forms for modern research. Academia, in a broader sense understood as “the locus of seeking truth and learning through methodological inquiry,” will subsist in different forms. The conclusion is therefore pessimistic with respect to the academic system as it presently exists but not to scholarly endeavour as such. However, the transformation predicted is expected to be fundamental.

Self-determination in politics has become the ideal everybody accepts. This paper argues that such contentment undermines the very idea of democracy. Democracy should be open to criticism and change. Two possible developments are considered: (a) More political power should be given to the citizens. Direct democracy is the appropriate form of democracy for the 21st century. (b) Many innovations are possible in democracy. The focus is on the potential role of random mechanisms to secure that the population is more fully represented in the political process both with respect to the persons in politics and the decisions taken.

Awards are widespread in all countries and are prevalent both in the public sphere and in the private sector. This paper argues, and empirically supports, that awards serve public functions and economists should take them seriously. Using a unique cross-country data set, we suggest that awards serve as signals. Awards are more prevalent the more difficult the position and status of an individual is to observe due to an anonymous and globalized setting.