Implicit Laboratory Association (ImpLab) is a registered association aimed to foster research and facilitate debate on issues related to implicit cognition. The second annual Workshop of ImpLab was held in June 2007 at Budapest. Cognitive researchers, psychologists, physicists, entrepreneurs, economics and financial experts examined The Role of Intuition in Decision-making and Economics. Participants of the workshop discussed the latest scientific findings of how human intuitive, non-conscious processes could improve business decisions.

Economic development influences democratic survival more than it influences transitions to democracy, yet existing scholarship provides few mechanisms to explain how regime transition and persistence processes differ. We build a model of decision-making that specifies how the current regime influences the choices of economic elites, the military, and non-elites. The model draws on prospect theory to specify how risks, reference values, and resource levels enter the dynamics of political decisions. Experimental scenarios test our model’s predictions. We generate and analyze data from 325 subjects. Subjects are more likely to accept risks to avoid losses (rather than to achieve gains), especially at higher stakes. These findings support the model’s insights about how regimes condition preferences over possible actions: Existing and post-transition democracies redistribute income similarly, but only transitions change how key actors evaluate their support for or opposition to democracy.