Guidance on use: Clarity-enhancing jargon is always welcome. Identity-reinforcing jargon is generally to be avoided but can sometimes have signalling value that you might wish to leverage.

Clarity-enhancing jargon succinctly and precisely articulates a concept that does not otherwise have a name.

Examples: Present bias; loss aversion

Welfare effects: Unambiguously positive. By making a specific concept more tractable and more widely-understood it enhances the welfare of the writer, the expert reader and, if supplemented with a well-chosen example, the novice reader too.

Identity-reinforcing jargon succinctly and precisely articulates some concept but using language that is less-widely understood than some available alternative.

Example: hyperbolic discounting, which is a more niche and less-widely understood way of describing present bias. People who have already received training in behavioural economics understand that discounting here refers to intertemporal discounting. And they might understand that the intertemporal discount function should normatively be exponential but that under conditions of present bias intertemporal choice data is better fitted by a hyperbolic function. So the phrase “hyperbolic discounting” simply describes “present bias”.

Welfare effects: Enhances the welfare of the writer and the in-group reader by conveying the information to them. Might also grant positive welfare through signalling value e.g. by consolidating their sense of being part of the in-group.

Reduces the welfare of the out-group reader. Reduces fluency, may alienate them and may cause them to misinterpret the key point.