Some products, notably but not only platforms, increase in value for users as the number of other users increases. These interaction or network effects can result in ‘product market traps’ (Bursztyn et al., 2023) where people who use the product would be better off if they all stopped using it and switched to another product, but cannot because of coordination problems. A parallel but overlooked phenomenon is the labor market trap, where employees would be better off if they collectively left an employer, job, or profession, but cannot because of the difficulty of coordination. Product market and labor market traps pose a challenge to public policy because of the complexity of people’s behavior in networks, but can be mitigated in some cases with relatively simple taxes and regulatory interventions.

ABSTRACT IMPACT: This project successfully implemented a promising team science model by introducing and facilitating best practices to develop high functioning teams working to accelerate health innovations from bench to bedside. OBJECTIVES/GOALS: The goal of this project was to improve the team science knowledge, skills, and attitudes of interdisciplinary engineering students (undergraduate and graduate) who were partnered with health professionals to develop technical solutions to translational health challenges during a year-long Engineering Innovation in Health (EIH) program. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We adapted, implemented, and evaluated team science training content and approaches in the EIH program at the University of Washington (UW). EIH faculty and the UW Institute of Translational Health Sciences’ (ITHS) Team Science Core co-developed and delivered highly interactive team science training modules and evaluated their impact with biannual surveys. A student cohort was surveyed prior to the implementation of the team science trainings, which served as a baseline. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize student demographics and survey responses within and between years. Median and interquartile range of responses to Likert-type questions were calculated, and Mann-Whitney U Tests (independent samples Wilcoxin Rank Sum Tests) were used to test for differences within and between years. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: During both the baseline and the team training year, student demographics were similar in terms of gender and past experience working in teams. Team training during the first year of implementation was well-received. Post-implementation surveys of students demonstrated measurable improvement in team dynamics, communication, and effectiveness; including, students reporting higher levels of psychological safety and self-efficacy within their teams. Comparisons within the team training year and between the baseline and team training years identified numerous instances in which differences were statistically significant. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS: Tailored team science training in an interdisciplinary EIH program was successful at improving psychological safety and self-efficacy among undergraduate and graduate students and offers a promising model for similar settings and audiences.

We provide experimental evidence for the existence of “rent stigma,” a preference for owning goods or real estate to renting them. In one experiment, anonymous respondents preferred owning a car or house to renting them, even though the transaction was constructed to be identical in each case in terms of economic payoffs and risk. In a second experiment, a survey of law students who were asked how much they would pay to own rather than rent a laptop found similar results. However, we found little or no evidence for our hypotheses that rent stigma would decline in conditions in which the advantages of renting were made salient. The existence of rent stigma raises concerns that the framing of a transaction in terms of purchasing rather than rent may be used to manipulate consumers.

Papers in the burgeoning empirical literature on distributive politics often focus their analysis on the pattern of distribution of a single patronage good—for example, cash transfers, roads, education spending, electrification, or targeted grants. Yet because governments can favor constituencies through the targeting of multiple public and private goods, drawing general conclusions about distributive politics by investigating just one (or even a few) good(s) can be misleading. We demonstrate the severity of this problem by investigating a particular manifestation of distributive politics—ethnic favoritism—in a particular setting—Africa—and show that the conclusions one draws about who benefits from government allocation decisions can vary markedly depending on the outcome one happens to study. Our findings suggest the need for caution in making general claims about who benefits from distributive politics and raise questions about extant theoretical conclusions that are based on empirical work that focuses on a single distributive outcome. The findings also provide a foundation for a new research agenda aimed at identifying the reasons why political leaders choose to favor their supporters with some public and private goods rather than others.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea demonstrates plausible economic logic by assigning jurisdiction over portions of the ocean to the states that value them the most and can regulate them most cheaply, while respecting other states΄ interests in navigation and additional uses of the seas. For the vast oceanic areas that no state can regulate, the Convention provides for an open access regime subject to simple rules, mostly self-enforcing, to limit conflict over resources.