Cybersecurity cannot be ensured with mere technical solutions. Hackers often use fraudulent emails to simply ask people for their password to breach into organizations. This technique, called phishing, is a major threat for many organizations. A typical prevention measure is to inform employees but is there a better way to reduce phishing risks? Experience and feedback have often been claimed to be effective in helping people make better decisions. In a large field experiment involving more than 10,000 employees of a Dutch ministry, we tested the effect of information provision, simulated experience, and their combination to reduce the risks of falling into a phishing attack. Both approaches substantially reduced the proportion of employees giving away their password. Combining both interventions did not have a larger impact.
Prevention efforts, such as quitting smoking, flu vaccination, and exercising, are of crucial importance in health policy, but people tend to undertake too few of them. The main reason is that most prevention efforts only reduce but do not completely eliminate the risk of poor health. This makes it harder for people to assess the benefits of prevention, because they tend to misperceive and transform probabilities. In “When Risk Perception Gets in the Way: Probability Weighting and Underprevention,” Baillon et al. introduce psychological insights (probability weighting) in a model of optimal decision making and show that most people undertake too little prevention when the risk of poor health is between 10% and 80%. The paper discusses several policy measures to make people spend more on prevention.
Empirical studies of ambiguity attitudes to date have focused on events of moderate likelihood. Extrapolation to rare events requires caution. In an Ellsberg-like experiment with very unlikely events, we measured ambiguity attitudes with neither assumptions on subjects' beliefs nor restrictions to specific ambiguity models. Very unlikely events were overweighted, being weighted more strongly in isolation than when part of larger events. Using latent profile analysis, we classified the subjects in terms of deviations from ambiguity neutrality. One third behaved close to ambiguity neutrality. The others exhibited overweighting of rare events. Such behavior can lead to money-pump situations.
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