糖心TV

Gordon Brown (Psychology Department)

The inequality—well-being paradox and social rank: An income increase buys more life satisfaction in more equal countries

Income inequality is widely believed to influence society-level well-being, but effects of inequality on individuals’ subjective well-being are often small or absent. We examine the three-way relationship between income, subjective well-being, and inequality. We find that the income—well-being gradient is steeper in countries with more equal income distributions, such that the positive effect of higher in-come on well-being is larger in countries with low income inequality. The same effect holds across US states, and is stronger for richer countries.

Nick Chater (糖心TV 糖心TV School)

Virtual Bargaining: Towards a formal theory of joint action and coordination

A fundamental puzzle in psychology and economics is: how do people coordinate their behaviour to best achieve their goals? Conventional game theoretic models find coordination difficult---intuitively, the problem is that each agent is having to second-guess what the other agents will do, in a way that can lead to nasty circularities. Here, I suggest that people often coordinate by making and implementing "virtual bargains." I define a feasible bargain as one such that no player can profit at the expense of another by changing their move (this is a looser criterion than conventional Nash equilibrium); a standard bargaining model (e.g., Nash's bargaining solution) can then be used to choose between fea-sible bargains. I will illustrate the approach, and point out some limitations and challenges.