14,889 research outputs found
Distinguishing Overconfidence from Rational Best-Response in Markets
This paper studies the causal effect of individuals' overconfidence and bounded rationality on asset markets. To do that, we combine a new market mechanism with an experimental design, where (1) players' interaction is centered on the inferences they make about each others' information, (2) overconfidence in private information is controlled by the experimenter (i.e., used as a treatment), and (3) natural analogs to prices, returns and volume exist. We find that in sessions where subjects are induced to be overconfident, volume and price error analogs are higher than predicted by the fully-rational model. However, qualitatively similar results are obtained in sessions where there is no aggregate overconfidence. To explain this, we suggest an alternative possibility: participants strategically respond to the errors contained in others' actions by rationally discounting the informativeness of these actions. Estimating a structural model of individuals' decisions that allows for both overconfidence and errors, we are able to separate these two channels. We find that a substantial fraction of excess volume and price error analogs is attributable to strategic response to errors, while the remaining is attributable to overconfidence. Further, we show that price analog exhibit serial autocorrelation only in the overconfidence-induced sessions.
An Introduction to Mechanized Reasoning
Mechanized reasoning uses computers to verify proofs and to help discover new
theorems. Computer scientists have applied mechanized reasoning to economic
problems but -- to date -- this work has not yet been properly presented in
economics journals. We introduce mechanized reasoning to economists in three
ways. First, we introduce mechanized reasoning in general, describing both the
techniques and their successful applications. Second, we explain how mechanized
reasoning has been applied to economic problems, concentrating on the two
domains that have attracted the most attention: social choice theory and
auction theory. Finally, we present a detailed example of mechanized reasoning
in practice by means of a proof of Vickrey's familiar theorem on second-price
auctions
The Configurable SAT Solver Challenge (CSSC)
It is well known that different solution strategies work well for different
types of instances of hard combinatorial problems. As a consequence, most
solvers for the propositional satisfiability problem (SAT) expose parameters
that allow them to be customized to a particular family of instances. In the
international SAT competition series, these parameters are ignored: solvers are
run using a single default parameter setting (supplied by the authors) for all
benchmark instances in a given track. While this competition format rewards
solvers with robust default settings, it does not reflect the situation faced
by a practitioner who only cares about performance on one particular
application and can invest some time into tuning solver parameters for this
application. The new Configurable SAT Solver Competition (CSSC) compares
solvers in this latter setting, scoring each solver by the performance it
achieved after a fully automated configuration step. This article describes the
CSSC in more detail, and reports the results obtained in its two instantiations
so far, CSSC 2013 and 2014
Hypothesis Transfer Learning with Surrogate Classification Losses: Generalization Bounds through Algorithmic Stability
Hypothesis transfer learning (HTL) contrasts domain adaptation by allowing
for a previous task leverage, named the source, into a new one, the target,
without requiring access to the source data. Indeed, HTL relies only on a
hypothesis learnt from such source data, relieving the hurdle of expansive data
storage and providing great practical benefits. Hence, HTL is highly beneficial
for real-world applications relying on big data. The analysis of such a method
from a theoretical perspective faces multiple challenges, particularly in
classification tasks. This paper deals with this problem by studying the
learning theory of HTL through algorithmic stability, an attractive theoretical
framework for machine learning algorithms analysis. In particular, we are
interested in the statistical behaviour of the regularized empirical risk
minimizers in the case of binary classification. Our stability analysis
provides learning guarantees under mild assumptions. Consequently, we derive
several complexity-free generalization bounds for essential statistical
quantities like the training error, the excess risk and cross-validation
estimates. These refined bounds allow understanding the benefits of transfer
learning and comparing the behaviour of standard losses in different scenarios,
leading to valuable insights for practitioners
First-year composition and transfer: a quantitative study
The present study investigated the effect of writing pedagogy on transfer by examining the effect of pedagogical orientation (WAC/WID or ‘traditional’) on content-area grades. Participants were 1,052 undergraduates from 17 schools throughout the United States. Hypothesis was that the WAC/WID orientation would lead to higher transfer levels as measured by participants’ higher content-area performance. Composition grades were collected in year one; content-area grades where collected in year two. Propensity scores were calculated to stratify the groups and minimize selection bias of writing-class assignment, thereby allowing quasi-causal inference. An ANOVA was performed on the resulting 2-by-5 stratified data. Results indicated that students who completed the WAC/WID composition classes received significantly higher content grades than those in the ‘traditional’ writing classes. The results confirmed the hypothesis
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