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Attitudes to risk play a central role in economics. Policy makers should know them in order to judge the certainty equivalent of the effects of policy on individuals. What might look like a policy improvement when judged by the average impact could easily entail a welfare loss for risk averse individuals if the variance of expected impacts is wide compared to the alternatives.

We review the experimental evidence on risk aversion in controlled laboratory settings. We review the strengths and weaknesses of alternative elicitation procedures, the strengths and weaknesses of alternative estimation procedures, and finally the effect of controlling for risk attitudes on inferences in experiments.

We review the use of behavior from television game shows to infer risk attitudes. These shows provide evidence when contestants are making decisions over very large stakes, and in a replicated, structured way. Inferences are generally confounded by the subjective assessment of skill in some games, and the dynamic nature of the task in most games. We consider the game shows Card Sharks, Jeopardy!, Lingo, and finally Deal Or No Deal. We provide a detailed case study of the analyses of Deal Or No Deal, since it is suitable for inference about risk attitudes and has attracted considerable attention.

Much of the literature on theories of decision making under risk has emphasized differences between theories. One enduring theme has been the attempt to develop a distinction between “normative” and “descriptive” theories of choice. Bernoulli (1738) introduced log utility because expected value theory was alleged to have descriptively incorrect predictions for behavior in St. Petersburg games. Much later, Kahneman and Tversky (1979) introduced prospect theory because of the alleged descriptive failure of expected utility (EU) theory (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1947).

While it is generally well known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the US southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semistructured interviews with members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, we contribute unique insights about how the nonviolent repertoire was diffused into one movement current that became integral to moving the wider southern movement. Innovating with the concept of serially linked movement schools – locations where the deeply intense work took place, the didactic and dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting, creatively translating, and resocializing human agents in preparation for dangerous performance – we follow the biographical paths of carriers of the nonviolent Gandhian repertoire as it was learned, debated, transformed, and carried from India to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and Howard University to Nashville (TN) and then into multiple movement campaigns across the South. Members of the Nashville movement core cadre – products of the Nashville movement workshop schools – were especially important because they served as bridging leaders by serially linking schools and collective action campaigns. In this way, they played critical roles in bridging structural holes (places where the movement had yet to be successfully established) and were central to diffusing the movement throughout the South. Our theoretical and empirical approach contributes to the development of the dialogical perspective on movement diffusion generally and to knowledge about how the nonviolent repertoire became integral to the US civil rights movement in particular.

The tendency for nations to move toward implementing independent and conservative central bankers has gained momentum over the past two decades. This trend continues despite the fact that the benefits of central bank independence (CBI) are highly contested among economists. The ability of a central bank to boost economic growth has been seriously compromised due to the emergence of the concept, or knowledge, of independent CBI as per the New Zealand model. In this chapter, we will propose a new line of research for the knowledge economy to underscore the ramifications of substituting local, or regional, knowledge by international knowledge. The goal of this chapter is to assess whether the new knowledge has real merits vis-à-vis the old knowledge of central banking. If not, this chapter will issue a caveat to policy makers to be careful in replacing old knowledge by new knowledge – the new does not always mean a better knowledge. In other words, this chapter will highlight the potential dangers of using untested new knowledge and its economic consequences. This chapter contributes to the literature on CBI by introducing analytical methods not previously used in empirical examination of central banks. Analysis has uncovered the presence of high mobility in economic variables that is unexplained by changes in CBI. The chapter addresses the question of mobility by making use of mobility measures and linear regression in an attempt to identify the source of this mobility. The results from the regression are significant to the theory of central bank independence as they imply that consolidation of inflation rates are not reciprocated with consolidation of economic growth, as conventional theory would suggest.