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

Research evaluation is praised as the symbol of modern quality management. We claim firstly, performance evaluations in research have higher costs than normally assumed, because the evaluated persons and institutions systematically change their behavior and develop counter strategies. Moreover, intrinsic work motivation is crowded out and undesired lock-in effects take place. Secondly, the benefits of performance evaluations are questionable. Evaluations provide too little information relevant for decision-making. In addition, they lose importance due to new forms of scientific cooperation on the internet. Thirdly, there exist superior alternatives. They consist in careful selection and supportive process coaching – and then leave individuals and research institutions to direct themselves.

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Bei der Bewahrung des Kultur- und Naturerbes spielt die Unesco-Liste eine wichtige Rolle. Die Autoren zeigen im Folgenden neben deren Vorteilen indessen auch die Nachteile auf und schlagen unter anderem marktorientierte Alternativen vor.

Die Päpste sprechen immer mehr Personen heilig. Hinter der Auswahl stehen allzu menschliche Faktoren.

This paper suggests that institutional factors which reward social networks at the expenses of productivity can play an important role in explaining brain drain. The effects of social networks on brain drain are analyzed in a decision theory framework with asymmetric information. We distinguish between the role of insidership and personal connections. The larger the cost of being an outsider, the smaller is the number and the average ability of researchers working in the domestic job market. Personal connections partly compensate for this effect by attracting highly connected researchers back. However, starting from a world with no distortions, personal connections also increase brain drain.

Awards—widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere—are motivators that derive their value from non-pecuniary concerns such as status and self-image. Quasi-experimental panel data from the call center of a large international bank allow us to estimate the causal impact on effort when receiving an award. The performance of winners proves to be significantly higher than that of comparable nonrecipients after the award has been presented. This increase in work effort is sizeable and robust. We investigate the various theories that could explain the change in behavior. We find that image concerns most likely drive the effect.

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. Such rankings do not effectively measure research quality, which should be the essence of any evaluation. These quantity rankings are not objective; two citation rankings, based on different samples, produce entirely different results. For that reason, an alternative ranking is developed as a quality indicator, based on membership on academic editorial boards of professional journals. It turns out that the ranking of individual scholars based on that measure is far from objective. Furthermore, the results differ markedly, depending on whether research quantity or quality is considered. Thus, career decisions based on rankings are dominated by chance and do not reflect research quality. We suggest that evaluations should rely on multiple criteria. Public management should return to approved methods such as engaging independent experts who in turn provide measurements of research quality for their research communities.

The UNESCO World Heritage List contains the 900 most treasured Sites of humanity’s culture and landscapes.nThe World Heritage List is beneficial where heritage sites are undetected, disregarded by national decision-makers, not commercially exploitable, and where national financial resources, political control and technical knowledge for conservation are inadequate.nAlternatives such as the market and reliance on national conservation list are more beneficial where the cultural and natural sites are already popular, markets work well, and where inclusion in the List does not raise the destruction potential by excessive tourism, and in times of war or by terrorists.

Museums have many different goals beyond efficiency such as social equity, financial revenue, attracting donors and gaining international, regional or local prestige. Various pricing schemes are being discussed with the aim of reaching these goals. Thenclassical ones are entry prices and free entry. The museum club solution or exit donationsnallow for various additional goals. Each scheme has clear advantages and disadvantages.nWe propose an innovative pricing instrument: Exit prices, which are charged according to the time spent in a museum. This scheme has a number of notable advantages, in particular the better choice available to the visitors, which increases their satisfaction.

To understand human behavior, it is important to know under what conditions people deviate from selfish rationality. This study explores the interaction of natural survival instincts and internalized social norms using data on the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania. We show that time pressure appears to be crucial when explaining behavior under extreme conditions of life and death. Even though the two vessels and the composition of their passengers were quite similar, the behavior of the individuals on board was dramatically different. On the Lusitania, selfish behavior dominated (which corresponds to the classical homo economicus); on the Titanic, social norms and social status (class) dominated, which contradicts standard economics. This difference could be attributed to the fact that the Lusitania sank in 18 min, creating a situation in which the short-run flight impulse dominated behavior. On the slowly sinking Titanic (2 h, 40 min), there was time for socially determined behavioral patterns to reemerge. Maritime disasters are traditionally not analyzed in a comparative manner with advanced statistical (econometric) techniques using individual data of the passengers and crew. Knowing human behavior under extreme conditions provides insight into how widely human behavior can vary, depending on differing external conditions.

Research on happiness has produced valuable insights into the sources of subjective well-being. A major finding from this literature is that people exhibit a 'baseline' happiness that shows persistent strength over time, and twin studies have shown that genes play a significant role in explaining the variance of baseline happiness between individuals. However, these studies have not identified which genes might be involved. This article presents evidence of a specific gene that predicts subjective well-being. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we show thatnindividuals with a transcriptionally more efficient version of the serotonin transporter gene (5HTT) are significantly more likely to report higher levels of life satisfaction. Having one or two alleles of the more efficient type raises the average likelihood of being very satisfied with one's life by 8.5% and 17.3%, respectively. This result maynhelp to explain the stable component of happiness and suggests that genetic association studies can help us to better understand individual heterogeneity in subjective well-being.

An empirical overview of the UNESCO World Heritage List according to various characteristics is presented. The officially stated intention of the World Heritage List is to protect global heritage. Our focus is on the imbalance of the existing List according to countries and continents. The existing distribution is compared to hypothetical distributions considered “balanced” from different points of view. Itnturns out that the World Heritage List is unbalanced with respect to a distribution of Sites according to population, area or per capita income. This paper wants to reveal facts about the existing distribution, and is designed tonhelp a reasoned discussion to emerge.

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