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In Case You Haven't Heard…

The outcomes of lawsuits against opioid pharmaceutical companies — and how the treatment and prevention field would benefit from any proceeds — are up in the air. But this hasn't stopped contingency law firms from putting out their ads looking for clients who were victimized by opioids. The ads started appearing more and more after Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, which left the states and others hoping for a windfall unsure of next steps. Lawyers to the rescue. “FILE YOUR CLAIM AGAINST PURDUE PHARMA today. Time is of the essence. You can collect damage$ for you or a loved one” is a typical message. There are different options. Consider what Ryan Hampton is doing. He filed a claim against Purdue Pharma and will dedicate any money recovered to prevention, treatment, harm reduction and recovery support. Hampton, in recovery himself, runs such programs. His work in this area is not to be confused with his work with Andrew Kessler, Geoffrey Laredo and Regina LaBelle on helping states come up with solutions, using any settlement funds, to the treatment infrastructure problem (see ADAW, Sept. 9). Hampton's lawsuit and that group's consultancy to states are different and separate, according to Hampton and Kessler.

Identifying Present-Bias from the Timing of Choices

Timing decisions are common: when to file your taxes, finish a referee report, or complete a task at work. We ask whether time preferences can be inferred when only task completion is observed. To answer this question, we analyze the following model: each period a decision maker faces the choice whether to complete the task today or to postpone it to later. Cost and benefits of task completion cannot be directly observed by the analyst, but the analyst knows that net benefits are drawn independently between periods from a time-invariant distribution and that the agent has time-separable utility. Furthermore, we suppose the analyst can observe the agent's exact stopping probability. We establish that for any agent with quasi-hyperbolic β,δ-preferences and given level of partial naivete, the probability of completing the task conditional on not having done it earlier increases towards the deadline. And conversely, for any given preference parameters β,δ and (weakly increasing) profile of task completion probability, there exists a stationary payoff distribution that rationalizes her behavior as long as the agent is either sophisticated or fully naive. An immediate corollary being that, without parametric assumptions, it is impossible to rule out time-consistency even when imposing an a priori assumption on the permissible long-run discount factor. We also provide an exact partial identification result when the analyst can, in addition to the stopping probability, observe the agent's continuation value.

Philanthropy, Evaluation, Accountability, and Social Change

All foundations know the accountability checklist. Avoid self-dealing. File your 990 on time. Pay the excise tax. Be transparent about your grant processes. Avoid excessive compensation. Avoid luxury perks for board members. Commit to board development. Do not bully nonprofits. Keep administrative costs low. Have HR establish annual performance reviews for individual staff members. Benchmark internal processes against those of other foundations. Seek cause-and-effect attribution regarding quantitative outcome targets for grants.

Comprehending speaker intent in rebuttal analogy use: the role of irony mapping, absurdity comparison and argumentative convention.

Rebuttal analogies (e.g., "Politicians arguing over the renaming of an airport is like watering your petunias when your house is on fire") are commonly used as responses in verbal conflicts. The following study investigated the role that irony mapping, absurdity comparison, and argumentative convention play in interpreters' derivations of speaker's intentions in using rebuttal analogies. In general, these intentions are to demonstrate the unsoundness of the opposed proposition ("argument") and its advocate ("social attack"), (Whaley & Holloway, 1996). Three rebuttal analogy types were rated on argumentativeness and social attack in verbal conflict and nonverbal conflict scenarios. The results of six experiments on 120 participants found that analogies with ironic bases (e.g., "Doubling the defense budget in order to intimidate North Korea is like using a chainsaw to file your nails") were perceived as more of a social attack and as more argumentative than analogies with absurd (e.g., "... using ketchup to wax your car") and nonironic (e.g., "... using a nailfile to file your nails") bases. No difference was found between the two scenario types. Norming data confirmed equivalence of absurdity of ironic and absurd bases, and greater irony of ironic over absurd bases. The results thus implicate hearers' use of the ironic structure between bases and targets in the interpretation of rebuttal analogies rather than mere absurdity comparison or argumentative convention.

Patents for the Physicist

Mr. Liebesny has provided (in the November 1966 issue of the Bulletin) a remarkably clear and readable account of the British legal arrangements for the protection of industrial property. However, there are a few practical points which I think should be brought to the attention of prospective inventors. If you want to obtain patent protection for an invention, you must describe it fully in a patent application, as Mr. Liebesny said, and—this is the point which I think needs further emphasis—you must file your application at the Patent Office before you allow your invention or any description of it to be seen, heard or examined by any member of the public.