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A concern that people ought to be given what they deserve, in both positive and negative senses, lies deep within the human psyche. Views on the level of reward or punishment that a person deserves for their actions will differ across persons, places, and time, but, I argue in this article, depend substantively upon some combination of intentions and outcomes. Using these characteristics, I propose a taxonomy of actions, ordered from most to least blameworthy, with, for example, it being suggested that for any particular level of harm an intentional yet unrealized harm is more blameworthy than an unintentional yet realized harm (a similar taxonomy can be developed for the positive domain of praiseworthy actions). The taxonomy is focused upon people's actions toward others, but I finish the article with a discussion of desert in relation to people's intentions toward themselves. Ultimately, I contend that the strength and sustainability of public sector services and welfare systems, not to mention our private relationships, rely upon the recognition that desert underpins our notion of justice.

Behavioural public policy has thus far been dominated by approaches that are based on the premise that it is entirely legitimate for policymakers to design policies that nudge or influence people to avoid desires that may not be in their own self- interest. This book argues, instead, for a liberal political economy that radically departs from these paternalistic frameworks. Oliver argues for a framework whereby those who impose no substantive harms on others ought to be free of manipulative or coercive interference. On this view, BPP does not seek to “correct” an individual's conception of the desired life. This book is the third in a trilogy of books by Adam Oliver on the origins and conceptual foundations of BPP.

This research project entitled “cerium lasers: ultraviolet, ultrafast, and ultracool” was introduced at the MQ Photonics Research Centre in Macquarie University with the aim of advancing ultrafast ultraviolet lasers based on Ce:LiCAF. This resulted in a new modelocking scheme for Ce:LiCAF lasers, a modified cross-correlation technique to measure the duration of the generated pulses, and characterisation of the spectral behaviour of the laser system. Combining a synchronous pumping scheme with Kerr-lens mode-locking led to the first hybrid mode-locking scheme within a Ce:LiCAF laser. Compared with previous results, the addition of this latter mode-locking mechanism decreased the generated pulse duration by more than a factor of 60, from 6 ps to 91 fs. This duration was measured by modifying asynchronous cross-correlation with a simple microscope cover-slip time reference introduced into half of the reference beam profile, dubbed split-beam asynchronous cross-correlation. This new approach determines the measurement time-scale more quickly, on the order of 104, reducing uncertainty. The intra-cavity dispersion of the Ce:LiCAF laser was calculated, and measured experimentally, which enabled Kerr-lens mode-locking. The phenomenon of dispersion tuning was characterised and utilised to determine the amount of intra-cavity dispersion, and as a guide for identifying the zero point, at which there is minimal tuning. Additional dispersive elements were used to dispersion-tune over a range of more than 5 nm in the region of 290 nm. The slope efficiency of the hybrid-mode-locked Ce:LiCAF laser was measured to be 9%, with a threshold of 1.0W. A low-transmission plane output coupler was used to achieve this, which also consolidated the output power from the previous four beams, via a near- Brewster’s-angle plate output coupler, into a single beam for the first time. The low threshold achieved using this output coupler enabled the first demonstration of un-chopped operation from the mode-locked Ce:LiCAF laser.

Der Beitrag präsentiert didaktische Erträge aus dem Projekt Religious Education Laboratory digital (RELab digital). Unter Kapitel 1 findet sich eine Beschreibung des Projektaufbaus. Kapitel 2 ist der religionspädagogischen Herausforderung eines Digital Religions-Unterrichts gewidmet. Kapitel 3 reflektiert den Einsatz digitaler Medien in religionspädagogischer Praxis im Spannungsfeld von Erwartungen und Unterrichtsrealitäten. Kapitel 4 fokussiert professionsbezogene Themen: Welchen Selbstkonzepten folgen Religionslehrkräfte bzw. welche sind durch ihr Handeln im Unterricht rekonstruierbar? Wie können die Spannungen, die im Unterricht zwischen der Nutzung von digitalen Medien und ihrer Deutung durch die Lehrkräfte aufkommen, produktiv für einen zukunftsfähigen Religionsunterricht aufgenommen werden? In einer Zeit, in der der exklusive Zugriff auf Religion im Unterricht immer weniger plausibel erscheint, führt das von uns vorgeschlagene Konzept eines Digital Religions –Unterricht zurück zu den existentiellen Bedürfnissen nach Religion. Es kann auf die Themenfelder der Digital Religions Bezug nehmen, die ihrerseits keineswegs neu für den Religionsunterricht sind, sondern seine Traditionen und Themen im Spiegel sich transformierender Kommunikationskulturen remixen: Autorität, Gemeinschaft, Wahrheit, Kommunikation, Autonomie, Religion, Identität und Ritual., The article presents didactic results from the project Religious Education Laboratory digital (RELab digital). Chapter 1 describes the structure of the project. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the pedagogical challenge of digital religious education. Chapter 3 reflects the use of digital media in religious education practice between expectations and classroom realities. Chapter 4 focuses on profession-related topics: Which self-concepts do religious education teachers follow, or which can be reconstructed through their actions in the classroom? How can the tensions that arise in the classroom between the use of digital media and their interpretation by teachers be productively taken up for a sustainable religious education? At a time when exclusive access to religion in the classroom seems less and less plausible, the concept of digital religion education we propose leads back to the existential needs for religion. It can refer to the thematic fields of digital religions, which in turn are not new for religious education, but remix its traditions and themes in the mirror of transforming communication cultures: authority, community, truth, communication, autonomy, religion, identity, and ritual.

In a previously published article, I reported some tests of prospect theory's reflection effect over outcomes defined by money and life years gained from treatment. Those results suggested qualified support for the reflection effect over money outcomes and strong support over longevity outcomes. This article reruns those tests while accounting for the intensity of individual risk attitudes, and, overall, show consistency with the reflection effect. However, I argue that these results do not necessarily offer support for the explanatory power of prospect theory. Rather, the results may be driven by evolved responses to circumstances that provoke perceptions of scarcity and abundance. Therefore, from an ecological perspective, behavioral patterns such as those that are consistent with the reflection effect, which, by extension, tend to be considered as erroneous or biased by most behavioral economists because they conflict with the postulates of rational choice theory, may not be unreasonable. Recognizing as such is important when considering how behavioral insights ought to inform public policy design and implementation.

The ultimatum and dictator games were developed to help identify the fundamental motivators of human behavior, typically by asking participants to share windfall endowments with other persons. In the ultimatum game, a common observation is that proposers offer, and responders refuse to accept, a much larger share of the endowment than is predicted by rational choice theory. However, in the real world, windfalls are rare: money is usually earned. I report here a small study aimed at testing how participants react to an ultimatum game after they have earned their endowments by either building a Lego model or spending some time sorting out screws by their length. I find that the shares that proposers offer and responders accept are significantly lower than that typically observed with windfall money, an observation that is intensified when the task undertaken to earn the endowment is generally less enjoyable and thus perhaps more effortful (i.e., screw sorting compared to Lego building). I suggest, therefore, that considerations of effort-based desert are often important drivers behind individual decision-making, and that laboratory experiments, if intended to inform public policy design and implementation, ought to mirror the broad characteristics of the realities that people face.

This study examines an undergraduate biology instructor’s use of video reflection for promoting students’ development as oral science communicators. After being provided with instruction on how to ...

This thesis details techniques necessary for the characterisation of the deep UV output from mode-locked cerium lasers. Previously 6 ps pulses have been obtained from an 80 MHz Ce:LiCAF laser, but these pulses are likely to have been chirped given there was no intracavity dispersion control. Full characterisation, using techniques such as frequency resolved optical gating (FROG), is needed to further develop these novel solid-state ultraviolet laser systems to their full potential as femtosecond or even attosecond lasers. The most appropriate technique for characterisation of deep UV ultrafast pulses is to perform synchronous cross correlation FROG (X-FROG) measurements using an auxilliary femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser as a reference. The first steps to achieving this are to synchronise two independent ultrafast lasers: the Ce:LiCAF laser under test with a femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser. Given that the Ce:LiCAF laser is itself synchronously pumped by the 266 nm fourth harmonic from a mode-locked Nd:YVO4 laser, initial synchronisation of the Ti:sapphire laser to the Nd:YVO4 laser is suitable for evaluating synchronisation and UV X-FROGtechniques. A femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser was synchronised to an independently running mod elocked Nd:YVO4 laser using balanced synchronisation techniques, and the timing uncertainties of the synchronisation were evaluated. Synchronous and asynchronous cross-correlation and FROG techniques were employed to evaluate the 266 nm pump laser and Ti:sapphire reference laser ultrafast pulses. This is the key first step to performing such measurements on the output of a cerium laser to allow further optimisation and external pulse compression of this system.

This article is a speculative perspective on the behavioural factors that may influence price negotiations between pharmaceutical ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’. It is contended that several behavioural economic-related phenomena may affect price negotiations, including anchoring, loss aversion, a tendency (or otherwise) to reciprocate and a concern for one's reputation. The most important influence, however, is likely to be anchoring, which will particularly benefit the seller of a product if they are allowed to set the initial anchor in a price negotiation. Consequently, it is argued that the most effective way in which to counter the seller's anchor is likely to be to regulate so that the buyer makes the first offer.

The common consequence effect and preference reversals are two of the foundational violations of the standard model of rational choice (i.e. von Neumann–Morgenstern expected utility theory) and, as such, played an important role in the development of empirical behavioural economics. One can hypothesise, however, that due to varying degrees of risk aversion when faced with outcomes of different magnitude, the rate of both of these violations may vary with outcome size. Using various types of outcome, this article reports tests of these violations using different outcome magnitudes in within-respondent designs. The results observed are broadly consistent across outcome type: the common consequence effect, while rarely being substantially observed in any of the tests undertaken, was often found to be somewhat susceptible to outcome size while preference reversals, which were everywhere substantially observed, were not. In and of itself, the observation of systematic preference reversals implies that preferences are often constructed according to the way in which questions are asked, and is sufficient to question the usefulness of stated preference techniques for informing public policy.

Over recent years, a number of behavioural economic-informed policy frameworks have been developed, ranging from soft and hard forms of paternalism, to regulation against negative externalities, the so-called nudge, shove and budge approaches. This article considers these different frameworks as applied to some of the challenges posed by the social care needs of contemporary societies. It is argued that all of the frameworks are worthy of serious consideration in this policy domain, in that they offer food for thought on how financial contributions to pay for social care might be increased, and how the quality of social care provision may be improved given available resources.

Over recent years, academics and policy makers in several countries have been advocating for measures of utility and happiness to replace gross domestic product as indicators of development. Yet the notion of utility has a somewhat confused history, meaning different things to different people at different times. Hume, for instance, aligned utility with public usefulness, Bentham with hedonic feelings of pleasure and pain, and Mill and modern welfare economists with pretty much anything, and this confusion has not been absent from contemporary calls for utilitarianism to inform public policy design and intervention. A possible reason why there are many different meanings attached to the concept of utility is because many people, much of the time, are not driven to maximise utility at all, irrespective of how it is defined. That is, the pursuit of utility does not drive all desires, but rather desires are antecedent; in those circumstances, at most, some conception of utility is a possible consequence of achieving one’s desires. Desires are multifarious and vary across people. The policy maker’s role over the private realm of individual decision-making should not therefore be to strive to maximise utility, but rather to put in place conditions that facilitate people in the pursuit of their own conception of a desired life.

In this article, I contend that the behavioural affects that tend to be labelled as errors by most behavioural economists, and as such have served as the justification for a paternalistic direction in behavioural public policy (i.e., policy intervention that aims to protect people from imposing harms on themselves), are in an ecological sense not errors at all. While acknowledging that modern societies are very different from the types of societies in which these affects evolved, I argue that we still cannot conclude that attempts to modify people’s choices in accordance with these so-called errors will improve the lives of those targeted for behaviour change, particularly given the varied and multifarious private objectives and desires that people pursue. Where people are imposing no substantive harms on others, I maintain that policy makers should restrict themselves to protecting and fostering the fundamental motivational force of reciprocity, which serves to benefit the group (which could be the whole society) and, by extension, most of the people who comprise the group, irrespective of their own personal desires in life. However, when one party to any particular exchange actively uses the behavioural affects to benefit themselves and imposes harms on the other party to the exchange, the concept of a free and fair reciprocal exchange has been violated. In these circumstances, there is an intellectual justification to introduce behavioural-informed regulations—a form of negative reciprocity—against activities that impose unacceptable harms on others. My arguments thus call for behavioural public policy to preserve individual autonomy within an overarching policy framework that nurtures reciprocity whilst at the same time regulates against behavioural-informed practices that impose substantive harms on others, rather than focusing on reducing the harms that people supposedly impose on themselves. This would be a major switch in emphasis for one of the most important developments in public policy in modern times. JEL Codes: D91, Z18

The principal objective of the liberal economic tradition is to encourage mutually advantageous actions between individuals, and the best means by which to do this, according to those who follow this tradition, is a demand-led competitive market. This article summaries the propositions of the liberal economic tradition and concludes that while its components ought to be tolerated over private decision-making in order to protect individual autonomy, the demand-led competitive market provides incentives for egoistic actions that may harm groups, and by extension, the individuals within those groups. As such, it is argued that it is not sensible to introduce or maintain a demand-led competitive market in public sector services because it may undermine the pursuit of broadly agreed-upon collective goals in these sectors. The article finishes with a discussion of some alternative public sector policy mechanisms that may better serve the aim of crowding in cooperative actions and behaviours.

Prospect theory is the most influential descriptive alternative to the orthodox model of rational choice under risk and uncertainty, in terms of empirical analyses of some of its principal parameters and as a consideration in behavioural public policy. Yet the most distinctive implication of the theory – a fourfold predicted pattern of risk attitudes called the reflection effect – has been infrequently studied and with mixed results over money outcomes, and has never been completely tested over health outcomes. This article reports tests of reflection over money and health outcomes defined by life years gained from treatment. With open valuation exercises, the results suggest qualified support for the reflection effect over money outcomes and strong support over health outcomes. However, in pairwise choice questions, reflection was substantially ameliorated over life years, remaining significant only for treatments that offered short additional durations of life.

Striving to better understand exemplification, this study examines the types of animal behavior references (anthropomorphic/non-anthropomorphic) and taxonomic groups featured in the examples given by an undergraduate biology instructor during a semester-long course. It is reported that instruction was dominated by anthropomorphic examples of mammals and birds. Further, these dominant examples were found to bias the conceptual knowledge acquired by students who showed a tendency to conceive of nonhuman conduct in terms of mammalian and avian action. It is argued that extending biological exemplification practices beyond mammals and birds is essential to help students develop deep conceptual knowledge and an unbiased appreciation of life.