Public adherence with health recommendations is vital for effective crisis response. During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments faced considerable challenges in persuading the public to adopt new recommendations. Using large-scale survey experiments across 12 Latin American countries, we investigate how respondents' agreement with health recommendations is affected by their attribution to experts from different sectors. Our results uncover a robust backlash against experts for pandemic-specific recommendations, but not for more general health advice. The backlash does not depend on the type of expert (academic, public or private sector). Our experimental setup allows us to concurrently assess the significance of different factors behind these results. Anti-intellectualism plays a role, since individuals with low initial trust in experts exhibit more negative reactions to expert attribution, although the backlash is also present for those with higher levels of trust, indicating that other factors likely play a role. We fail to find evidence that individual perceptions or personality traits such as social pressure, altruism or reactance contribute to the backlash. Beyond individual characteristics, we find that the backlash is stronger in countries that exhibited a more stringent government response to the pandemic. JEL Codes: I1, I3, H4

This article explores the complex interplay between deforestation policies and foreign influence, using a game theoretical model to analyze geopolitical factors influencing forest conservation decisions in countries with significant rainforests. The model highlights the conflicting interests of foreign powers – one aiming for economic benefits from agriculture and the other advocating for forest preservation to protect environmental services. The paper demonstrates how domestic political dynamics and economic shocks from the international economic influence regulatory decisions on deforestation in the shadow of foreign influence. This understanding is crucial for formulating strategies that balance developmental needs and global environmental concerns.

The unraveling prediction of disclosure theory relies on the idea that strategic forces lead firms (information senders) to voluntarily disclose information about the quality of their products provided the information disclosed is verifiable and the costs of disclosure are negligible. This theoretical prediction requires that consumers (information receivers) hold correct beliefs about non-disclosed information and, in equilibrium, treat all non-disclosed information with extreme skepticism. Previous research finds that receivers are insufficiently skeptical, or in other words are naive, about non-disclosed information, which leads to the failure of unraveling. This paper examines the extent to which naivety responds systematically to features of the decision environment, namely the availability of opportunities to communicate with others (Consultation treatment) and the context of the experimental setting (Context treatment, based on hygiene ratings). We find that complete unraveling fails to occur in all our treatments. Receiver's beliefs and guesses about non-disclosed information are similar across the Consultation and Context treatments relative to the Baseline implying that receivers are naive about non-disclosed information under naturalistic features that exist in field settings. We also find that senders are partly to blame for the lack of unraveling, as intermediate types would gain from disclosing more often given the observed receiver behavior.

We augment standard models of cultural transmission with an explicit account of social learning, grounded in the information transmission literature. Youngsters observe the behavioral trait of a role model and form beliefs about the desirability of that trait. Adults have better information about each trait and have a paternalistic attitude toward their children. This makes them reluctant to adopt myopic behavior to avoid setting a negative example to their children. This signaling distortion increases in the influence parents have over their offspring. We extend the model to allow parental influence to depend on the population frequency of each trait and show that cultural complementarity does not imply convergence to a homogeneous population. We find empirical support for a positive relationship between parental influence and propensity to exert self-restraint by looking at alcohol and tobacco consumption.

Guilt aversion has been shown to play an important role in economic decision-making. In this paper, we take an axiomatic approach to guilt by deducing a utility representation from a list of easily interpretable assumptions on an agent's preferences. It turns out that our logarithmic representation can mitigate the problem of multiplicity of equilibria to which psychological games are prone. We apply the model in three well-known games and show that its predictions are consistent with experimental observations.