BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

Most interventions against obesity use information to persuade people to change their behavior, with moderate results. Because eating involves automatic routines, new approaches have emerged appealing to non-reflective cognitive processes. Through a randomized controlled trial, we evaluated the impact of visual stimuli (positive and negative) on children's snack-choices at school. Results showed that the negative stimulus had no effect, while the positive stimulus increased the probability among girls of choosing a healthy snack. We also found that children with excess weight had a larger baseline probability of choosing the healthy snack than those without. We conclude that happy emojis, used to nudge non-reflective processes, can steer children towards healthy choices., This work was supported with funds from the Government of Navarra , Spain. Ariadna Garcia- Prado also acknowledges financial support from research projects ECO 2015-65408-R MINECO/ FEDER from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness , and PID 2019-104452RB-100 from the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain.

The objective of the study was to determine the prevalence of low scores in a diverse Latin American population for two neuropsychological commonly used tests to evaluate executive functions and to compare the number of low scores obtained using normative data from a Spanish-speaking population from Latin America versus an English-speaking population from U.S.A. Healthy adults (N = 5402) were administered the Modified Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Stroop Color-Word. Low scores on measures of executive functioning are common. Clinicians working with Spanish-speaking adults should take into account the higher probability of low scores on these measures to reduce false-positive diagnoses of cognitive deficits in an individual.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how risk attitudes in medical decisions for others vary across health contexts. A lab experiment was designed to elicit the risk attitudes of 257 medical and nonmedical students by assigning them the role of a physician who must decide between treatments for patients. An interval regression model was used to estimate individual coefficients of relative risk aversion, and an estimation model was used to test for the effect of type of medical decision and experimental design characteristics on elicited risk aversion. We find that (a) risk attitudes vary across different health contexts, but risk aversion prevails in all of them; (b) students enrolled in health‐related degrees show a higher degree of risk aversion; and (c) real rewards for third parties (patients) make subjects less risk‐averse. The results underline the importance of accounting for attitudes towards risk in medical decision making., Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and FEDER, Grant numbers: ECO2012‐3648, ECO2013‐43526‐R, ECO2015‐65031‐R and ECO2015‐65408‐R; Junta de Andalucía, Grant number: SEJ‐04992

This paper provides an alternative way of measuring human development that takes explicitly into account the differences in the countries’ population structures. The interest of this proposal stems from two complementary elements. First, that there is an enormous diversity in the population structures of those countries analysed in the Human Development Reports, particularly the shares of old people in the population. Second, that demographic characteristics are relevant in the evaluation of development possibilities. We propose to change the way of measuring health, education and material wellbeing, in order to take into account those differences in the population structures. Regarding the health component, we substitute Life Expectancy at Birth by Life Potential (the average life expectancy of the current population); concerning education, we change the average between Mean Years of Schooling and Expected Years of Schooling by the Education Potential (a variable that mimics life potential in this context). As for the material well-being, we propose using the Gross National Income per adult, instead of per capita, while keeping logs in the evaluation. The resulting indicator, called Demographically Adjusted Human Development Index, is the geometric mean of the three new variables suitably normalised. We analyse empirically the effect induced by these changes in the evaluation of human development by comparing this way of measurement with the conventional Human Development Index (HDI) for 168 countries., The first author acknowledges financial support from Project ECO2015-65820-P (MINECO/FEDER,UE). The second author also wishes to acknowledge financial support from Project ECO2017-86245-P (MINECO/FEDER/UE), as well as Junta de Andalucía under Project SEJ426. The third author acknowledges financial support from Project ECO2015-65408-R (MINECO/FEDER/UE).

There are many problems in the social sciences that refer to the evaluation of the relative performance of some populations when their members’ achievements are described by a distribution of outcomes over a set of ordered categories. A new method for the evaluation of this type of problems is presented here. That method, called balanced worth, offers a cardinal, complete and transitive evaluation that is based on the likelihood of getting better results. The evaluation of each society is based on the probability of obtaining better results with respect to the others. The balanced worth is a refinement of “the worth” (Herrero and Villar in PLoS ONE 8(12):e84784, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0084784) that overcomes its excessive sensitivity to the differences, due to the presence of ties. We also discuss how this method can be applied for the case of heterogeneous populations and show how it can be applied in different contexts. An empirical example, regarding life satisfaction in Spain is used to illustrate the working of this method., Funding was provided by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Grant Nos. ECO2015-65408-R, ECO2015-65820-P).

The expansion of Covid-19 has severely hit the community’s health all over the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people, subjecting health systems to an enormous stress (besides derailing economic activities and altering personal and social behavior). Two elements are essential to monitor the evolution of the pandemic as well as to analyze the effectiveness of the response measures: reliable data and useful indicators. We present an indicator that helps to assess the impact of Covid-19 on the community’s health, combining two different components: the extent of the pandemics (i.e. the share of the population affected) and its severity (the intensity of the disease on those affected). The severity measure derives from the application of an evaluation protocol that allows comparing population distributions based on the proportions of those affected with different health conditions. We illustrate the functioning of this indicator over a case study regarding the situation of the Italian regions on March 9 (the beginning of the confinement) and April 8, 2020, one month later., Carmen Herrero acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad under project ECO2015-65820P and Generalitat Valenciana. Antonio Villar acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad under project ECO2015-65408-R (MINECO/FEDER).

This paper presents an evaluation protocol that transforms a collection of rankings, defined over a set of alternatives, into a complete, transitive, and cardinal assessment. It combines the ideas of Borda and Condorcet by computing the support that each alternative receives on average when confronted with any other. The protocol evaluates those alternatives in terms of pairwise comparisons but weighs the outcomes differently depending on how each alternative fares with respect to the others. The evaluation appears as the stable distribution of an iterative process in which each alternative competes randomly with any other, and results in a vector of positive numbers that tells us the relative support of the different options. We show that this protocol does not require linear orderings and can also be applied in the presence of incomplete rankings and when dealing with several issues simultaneously., The first author acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad under project ECO2015-65820P, IMeRA, and Generalitat Valenciana, PROMETEO 2019/037. The second author recognizes financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad under project ECO2015–65408-R (MINECO/FEDER).

This paper seeks to compare income distributions from the opportunity advantage viewpoint. That is a measure of how likely it is for a representative individual of one society to receive a higher income than a representative individual of another. Opportunity advantage tries to measure the income opportunities a society offers to an individual, relative to other societies, evaluated from the “veil of ignorance” viewpoint. We show that this notion can be precisely formalised and results in a complete and cardinal income distribution evaluation. We also present an empirical illustration of the gender differences in wage distributions in Spain after the financial crisis. The results show that this criterion offers new insights into the evaluation of differences in opportunity., The first author acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad under projects ECO2015-65820P and PID2019-107081GB-I00, the Generalitat Valenciana under PROMETEO 2109/037, and IMeRA. The second author acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad under project ECO2015-65408-R (MINECO/FEDER).