Overfulfilling the Plan?

About half a month ago I announced my intention to write a paper on Shakespeare and Behavioral Economics in three drafts, with the first draft due today. I am pleased (and really, shocked) to announce that I have had a first (shortish, about 5,200 words) draft for a week or so already, and even sent it to a friend and got helpful comments back! I'm now trying to expand it a bit with a still-unwritten section on happiness, so I don't yet have a coherent draft 1.5. But I am willing to say that I have overfulfilled the plan for the July 1 deadline. 

I won't post the draft, but here are the section titles:

1. Introduction

2. Three Elements of Prospect Theory

3. Shakespeare on Reference Points and Loss Aversion

4. Shakespeare on Being Risk-Loving in the Loss Domain

5. Reference Points, Sunk Costs, and Subjective Value

6. Happiness (in progress)

7. Conclusion: Choose Your Reference Point Well

The second draft is due on July 18, and I want to maintain (and meet) that deadline. (Not sure that I will indeed include a Happiness section in Draft Two.) But given that I am ahead of schedule, I want to be more ambitious: I want to have a very rough prospectus together by July 18 for a book on Shakespeare and Economics. 

Incidentally, in the post setting up the initial deadlines I also mentioned that I wanted to send Nudging Drug Use off to a journal; I have done so. The prudent behavior would be to have in mind the next journal to send it to after it is rejected... but maybe I have become more resilient? Or not...

One and one-half months for a paper on Shakespeare and Behavioral Economics!

Five Drafts is back! 

OK, there was that paper from three years ago about Nudging Drug Use. I did indeed produce an almost complete(?) version for an October, 2022 conference, but then did nothing more -- until the past month. Here's the ssrn.com version (posted yesterday, so still preliminary) of Nudging Drug Use! The recent surge of activity on the paper is related to my Winter 2025 revival, after a 15 year or so interregnum, of my Regulation of Vice course. The next step is to send Nudging Drug Use off to a journal. Let me suggest a tight deadline for that, say, June 16, 2025 -- Bloomsday!

While I am updating the situation with previous Five Drafts endevours, let me mention that the published version of the Parthenon Marbles paper, retitled "Athens or London? The Parthenon Marbles and economic efficiency," is available (open access) here.

But the recalling to life of Five Drafts has nothing to do with this previous, unfinished business. No, Five Drafts is back because I want to write a paper in the next 1.5 months or so. The paper is about Shakespeare and Behavioral Economics -- a topic I have been blogging about on and off over the years. The idea is to build my Shakespeare collection, which in terms of publications (but not of mulling) is miniscule: here's the one (open access -- do you sense a pattern?)! I'll post a schedule, maybe for an Abstract and three drafts, on the sidebar. For the Abstract (which will no doubt be wildly incompatible with the contents of the finished version of the paper), I'll go with tomorrow: June 15, 2025.

Excited to be back drafting!

Russian Vice Policy Schedule

The working title of the Russian vice policy paper is "Vice Policy in Russia: Alcohol, Tobacco, Gambling"; my goal is to have a first draft complete (and posted here) by September 15, 2016. The deadline for the second draft is October 9, 2016, and the third and final (?) draft is slated for October 30, 2016. As for reading commitments, maybe a book each on alcohol, tobacco, and gambling? I'll start with alcohol -- perhaps Alcohol: A History, by Rod Phillips?

OK, here we go...

Parthenon Marbles Update [Itself Updated, August 8, 2016]

Although I did not post any drafts, the Parthenon Marbles paper was completed and presented in a timely fashion. My next goal is to revise it and to post the revision to ssrn.com; perhaps I will think about sending it to a journal, too. But let me "commit" to a posting date of February 29, 2016 -- that one seems memorable.

Update, August 8, 2016: OK, the February 29 deadline proved to be not all that committing, even if it is memorable. But the ssrn version has been posted, and is available here. Next up will be a few (five?) drafts of a paper on Russian vice policy...

Second Vice Paper, Regulating Vice, Revisited

Nearly two years ago I posted a draft of the second vice paper, "Regulating Vice". The final version was published some months ago, in Erich Goode, ed, The Handbook of Deviance, Wiley Handbooks in Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2015. A final pre-editing version is now available at ssrn.com.

That Third Vice Paper

Perhaps my draft schedule ended up not being a precise reflection of reality, but the third vice paper was completed and presented. The title is "Robust Alcohol Policy in Russia: Some Aspirational Measures;" rush to download it at ssrn.com by clicking here.

Here's the abstract:

Alcohol consumption is associated with severe externalities as well as negative effects suffered by drinkers themselves. The usual economics prescription for promoting social well-being in the face of externalities is to apply regulations, including taxes, to force decision makers to confront the full social costs of their choices. Self-harms suffered by rational and informed adult alcohol drinkers, alternatively, offer little rationale (by the lights of traditional economics) for coercive policies aimed at stemming alcohol consumption.

The inherent unknowability of the extent of rationality in drinking decisions suggests that the “first best” policy of leaving rational drinking unfettered, while attempting to adjust potentially irrational choices, is not available in practice. The contention of this paper is that a second-best approach should be robust, in the sense that the policy regime will work fairly well when drinkers are fully rational, and also will do a creditable job of serving social well-being when alcohol-related choices are marked by substantial rationality shortfalls. In the case of the Russian Federation, some policies that mark rather severe departures from the current alcohol system, but are consistent with robustness, include: voluntary self-exclusion from either alcohol purchases or consumption; mandatory exclusion for those who produce external alcohol-related harms; and, a buyer licensing scheme that relies on a “double default” system to reduce both alcohol prevalence and the harms that stem from the drinking that does take place. This paper explicates these “aspirational” alcohol control policies.

Third Vice Paper!

OK, if  things go according to plan, I will be presenting a vice policy paper in May, 2015, so I have to start writing one. Here are my first two self-imposed deadlines:

(1) Short Description of Paper: Wednesday, January 14, 2015
(2) Draft One: Wednesday, February 18, 2015.

Off we go.....