Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain. Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. (White Noise, Don DeLillo)

Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post World Net. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. IZA Discussion Paper No. 3333

The importance of ethical behavior to an organization has never been more apparent, and in recent years researchers have generated a great deal of knowledge about the management of individual ethical behavior in organizations. We review this literature and attempt to provide a coherent portrait of the current state of the field. We discuss individual, group, and organization-al influences and consider gaps in current knowledge and obstacles that limit our understanding. We conclude by offering directions for future research on behavioral ethics in organizations.

Privacy decision making can be surprising or even appear contradictory: we feel entitled to protection of information about ourselves that we do not control, yet willingly trade away the same information for small rewards; we worry about privacy invasions of little significance, yet overlook those that may cause significant damages. Dichotomies between attitudes and behaviors, inconsistencies in discounting future costs or rewards, and other systematic behavioral biases have long been studied in the psychology and behavioral economics literatures. In this paper we draw from those literatures to discuss the role of uncertainty, ambiguity, and behavioral biases in privacy decision making.

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The consumption of energy is unlike most consumable goods. It is abstract, invisible, and untouchable. Without a tangible manifestation, home energy usage often goes unnoticed. Advances in resource monitoring systems will soon provide real-time data on electricity, gas, and water usage in the home. This will produce a tremendous amount of data that can be analyzed and fed back to the user—creating a rich space of opportunities for HCI research. This paper outlines common misconceptions of energy usage in the home, establishes the potential of feedback to change energy consumption behavior, and introduces ten design dimensions of feedback technology with which to build and evaluate future systems.

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The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, a Research Centre based at the University of Bristol, was established in 1998. The principal aim of the CMPO is to develop understanding of the design of activities within the public sector, on the boundary of the state and within recently privatised entities with the objective of developing research in, and assessing and informing policy toward, these activities. Centre for Market and Public Organisation

May 20, 2004. This is a rough draft prepared for submission to the “Retrospectives” section of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Comments welcome. Thanks to Kim Border for an apt Smith quote, and to Ed Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer for encouragement. Even those college students most bored by economics, and confused about which direction those stupid two curves slope, are likely to remember the phrase “the invisible hand ” or the famous quotation from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (WN): “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our

This paper is dedicated to the empirical exploration of the welfare effect of expectations and progress per se. Using ten waves of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a panel household survey rich in subjective variables, the analysis suggests that for a given total stock of inter-temporal consumption, agents are more satisfied with an increasing time-profile of consumption: they seem to have a strong “taste for improvement”.