Dating Preferences and Meeting Opportunities in Mate Choice Decisions

Much empirical evidence shows that female and male partners look alike along a variety of attributes. It is however unclear how this positive sorting comes about, because marriage is an equilibrium outcome arising from a process that entails searching, meeting and choosing one another. This study takes advantage of a unique data set to shed light on the forces driving choices at the earliest stage of a relationship. Both women and men value physical attributes, such as age and weight, and reveal that their dating choices are assortative along several traits. Importantly, meeting opportunities are found to have a substantial role in determining dating proposals

Quantum Hamiltonian for gravitational collapse

Using a Hamiltonian formulation of the spherically symmetric gravity-scalar field theory adapted to flat spatial slicing, we give a construction of the reduced Hamiltonian operator. This Hamiltonian, together with the null expansion operators presented in an earlier work, form a framework for studying gravitational collapse in quantum gravity. We describe a setting for its numerical implementation, and discuss some conceptual issues associated with quantum dynamics in a partial gauge fixing.Comment: 17 pages, published version (minor changes

The spillover effects of monitoring:A field experiment

Published Online: March 13, 2015We provide field experimental evidence of the effects of monitoring in a context where productivity is multidimensional and only one dimension is monitored and incentivized. We hire students to do a job for us. The job consists of identifying euro coins. We study the direct effects of monitoring and penalizing mistakes on work quality and evaluate spillovers on unmonitored dimensions of productivity (punctuality and theft). We find that monitoring improves work quality only if incentives are harsh, but substantially reduces punctuality irrespectively of the associated incentives. Monitoring does not affect theft, with 10% of participants stealing overall. Our findings are supportive of a reciprocity mechanism, whereby workers retaliate for being distrusted

Incentives and Childrens's Dietary Choices: A Field Experiment in Primary Schools

We conduct a field experiment in 31 primary schools in England to test the effectiveness of different temporary incentive schemes, a standard individual based incentive scheme and a competitive scheme, on increasing the choice and consumption of healthy items at lunchtime. The individual scheme has a weak positive effect that masks significantly differential effects by age whereas all students respond positively to the competitive scheme.For our sample of interest, the competivie scheme increases choice of healthy items by 33% and consumption of healthy items by 48%, twice and three times as much as ain the individual incentive scheme, respectively. The positive effects generally carry over to the week immediately following the treatment but we find little evidence of any effects six months later. Our results show that incentives can work, at least temporarily, to increase healthy eating but that there are large differences in effectiveness between schemes. Furthermore it is important to analyse things at the individual level as average effects appear to be masking significant heterogeneous effects that are predicted by the health literature

Estimation of net survival for cancer patients: Relative survival setting more robust to some assumption violations than cause-specific setting, a sensitivity analysis on empirical data.

Net survival is the survival that would be observed if the only possible underlying cause of death was the disease under study. It can be estimated with either cause-specific or relative survival data settings, if the informative censoring is properly considered. However, net survival estimators are prone to specific biases related to the data setting itself. We examined which data setting was the most robust against violation of key assumptions (erroneous cause of death and inappropriate life tables). We identified 4285 women in the Geneva Cancer Registry, diagnosed with breast, colorectal, lung cancer and melanoma between 1981 and 1991 and estimated net survival up to 20 years using cause-specific and relative survival settings. We used weights to tackle informative censoring in both settings and performed sensitivity analyses to evaluate the impact of misclassification of cause of death in the cause-specific setting or of using inappropriate life tables on net survival estimates in the relative survival setting. For all the four cancers, net survival was highest when using the cause-specific setting and the absolute difference between the two estimators increased with time since diagnosis. The sensitivity analysis showed that (i) the use of different life tables did not compromise net survival estimation in the relative survival setting, whereas (ii) a small level of misclassification for the cause of death led to a large change in the net survival estimate in the cause-specific setting. The relative survival setting was more robust to the above assumptions violations and is therefore recommended for estimation of net survival

Background-Independence

Intuitively speaking, a classical field theory is background-independent if the structure required to make sense of its equations is itself subject to dynamical evolution, rather than being imposed ab initio. The aim of this paper is to provide an explication of this intuitive notion. Background-independence is not a not formal property of theories: the question whether a theory is background-independent depends upon how the theory is interpreted. Under the approach proposed here, a theory is fully background-independent relative to an interpretation if each physical possibility corresponds to a distinct spacetime geometry; and it falls short of full background-independence to the extent that this condition fails.Comment: Forthcoming in General Relativity and Gravitatio

Rewarding behavior with a sweet food strengthens its valuation

Sweet foods are commonly used as rewards for desirable behavior, specifically among children. This study examines whether such practice may contribute to reinforce the valuation of these foods. Two experiments were conducted, one with children, the other with rats. The first study, conducted with first graders (n = 214), shows that children who receive a food reward for performing a cognitive task subsequently value the food more compared to a control group who received the same food without performing any task. The second study, conducted on rats (n = 64), shows that rewarding with food also translates into higher calorie intake over a 24-hour period. These results suggest that the common practice of rewarding children with calorie-dense sweet foods is a plausible contributing factor to obesity and might therefore be ill advised. © 2021 This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication