Confidence Interval Estimation Tasks and the Economics of Overconfidence

Experiments in psychology, where subjects estimate confidence intervals to a series of factual questions, have shown that individuals report far too narrow intervals. This has been interpreted as evidence of overconfidence in the preciseness of knowledge, a potentially serious violation of the rationality assumption in economics. Following these results a growing literature in economics has incorporated overconfidence in models of, for instance, financial markets. In this paper we investigate the robustness of results from confidence interval estimation tasks with respect to a number of manipulations: frequency assessments, peer frequency assessments, iteration, and monetary incentives. Our results suggest that a large share of the overconfidence in interval estimation tasks is an artifact of the response format. Using frequencies and monetary incentives reduces the measured overconfidence in the confidence interval method by about 65%. The results are consistent with the notion that subjects have a deep aversion to setting broad confidence intervals, a reluctance that we attribute to a socially rational trade-off between informativeness and accuracy.overconfidence; uncertainty; monetary incentives; experiments

Semantic and inferencing abilities in children with communication disorders

Background: Semantic and inferencing abilities have not been fully examined in children with communication difficulties. Aims: To investigate the inferential and semantic abilities of children with communication difficulties using newly designed tasks. Methods & Procedures: Children with different types of communication disorder were compared with each other and with three groups of typically developing children: those of the same chronological age and two groups of younger children. In total, 25 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment and 22 children, also 11 years of age, with primary pragmatic difficulties were recruited. Typically developing groups aged 11 (n = 35; age‐match), and those aged 9 (n = 40) and 7 (n = 37; language similar) also participated as comparisons. Outcomes & Results: For Semantic Choices, children with specific language impairment performed significantly more poorly than 9‐ and 11‐year‐olds, whilst the pragmatic difficulties group scored significantly lower than all the typically developing groups. Borderline differences between specific language impairment and pragmatic difficulties groups were found. For inferencing, children with communication impairments performed significantly below the 11‐year‐old peers, but not poorer than 9‐ and 7‐year‐olds, suggesting that this skill is in line with language ability. Six children in the pragmatic difficulties group who met diagnosis for autism performed more poorly than the other two clinical groups on both tasks, but not statistically significantly so. Conclusions: Both tasks were more difficult for those with communication impairments compared with peers. Semantic but not inferencing abilities showed a non‐significant trend for differences between the two clinical groups and children with pragmatic difficulties performed more poorly than all typically developing groups. The tasks may relate to each other in varying ways according to type of communication difficulty

The Jet in M87 from e-EVN Observations

One of the most intriguing open questions of today's astrophysics is the one concerning the location and the mechanisms for the production of MeV, GeV, and TeV gamma-rays in AGN jets. M87 is a privileged laboratory for a detailed study of the properties of jets, owing to its proximity, its massive black hole, and its conspicuous emission at radio wavelengths and above. We started on November 2009 a monitoring program with the e-EVN at 5 GHz, during which two episodes of activity at energy E > 100 GeV have occured. We present here results of these multi-epoch observations. The inner jet and HST-1 are both detected and resolved in our datasets. One of these observations was obtained at the same day of the first high energy flare. A clear change in the proper motion velocity of HST-1 is present at the epoch ~2005.5. In the time range 2003 -- 2005.5 the apparent velocity is subluminal, and superluminal (~ 2.7c) after 2005.5.Comment: Proceedings of the Workshop "Fermi meets Jansky - AGN in Radio and Gamma-Rays", Savolainen, T., Ros, E., Porcas, R.W. & Zensus, J.A. (eds.), MPIfR, Bonn, June 21-23 2010. 4 pages 4 figure

Deflected Anomaly Mediation and Neutralino Dark Matter

We study the phenomenology of the neutralino dark matter in the so called deflected anomaly mediation scenario. This scheme is obtained from the minimal anomaly mediated scenario by introducing a gauge mediated sector with $N_f$ messenger fields. Unlike the former scheme the latter has no tachyons. We find that the neutralino is still the LSP in a wide region of the parameter space: it is essentially a pure bino in the scenario with $N_f=1$ while it can also be a pure higgsino for $N_f>1$. This is very different from the naive anomaly mediated scenario which predicts a wino like neutralino. Moreover we do not find any tachyonic scalars in this scheme. After computing the relic density (considering all the possible coannihilations) we find that there are regions in the parameter space with values compatible with the latest WMAP results with no need to consider moduli fields that decay in the early universe.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Hållbarhetsinformation i årsredovisningar –En jämförelse av statliga och privata företag

Bakgrund och problemdiskussion: Hållbarhetsrapportering har ökat kraftigt de senaste decennierna som ett svar på ökade påtryckningar från olika intressenter i samhället om att företag ska arbeta mer aktivt för en hållbar utveckling. Ett antal ramverk för hållbarhetsrapportering har i samband med detta vuxit fram. För statliga svenska företag finns det ett lagstadgat krav på att de ska rapportera enligt GRIs riktlinjer för hållbarhetsrapportering. För privata svenska företag finns ännu inte något sådant krav, utan de har större valfrihet gällande om och hur de ska hållbarhetsrapportera. Utmaningen för båda företagsgrupperna ligger i att försöka hitta en bra balans mellan jämförbarhet och väsentlighet i hållbarhetsrapporteringen. Syfte: Rapporten syftar till att försöka urskilja i vilken riktning utvecklingen av hållbarhetsrapportering är på väg och på så sätt kunna göra en trendanalys, samt att jämföra hur utvecklingen ser ut mellan privata och statligt ägda företag. Metod och teori: En innehållsanalys genomfördes av tio privata och tio statliga företags årsredovisningar från 2011, 2013 och 2015. Innehållet kodades utifrån företagens hållbarhetsinformation om miljömässiga och sociala aspekter. Vidare analyserades innehållet utifrån instititutionell teori, legitimitetsteori och intressentteori. Resultat och slutsatser: Studien visade att de statliga företagen presenterade mer hållbarhetsinformation i sina årsredovisningar än de privata inom alla tre kategorier: sociala aspekter, miljöaspekter och generell hållbarhetsinformation. Bland de statliga företagen syntes också en trend mot att avskaffa den separata hållbarhetsrapporten och integrera all information i årsredovisningen. Hos både privata och statliga företag låg fokus på miljömässiga aspekter hos majoriteten av företagen, men utvecklingen visade på ökat fokus på sociala aspekter

e-EVN monitoring of M87

M87 is a privileged laboratory for a detailed study of the properties of jets, owing to its proximity (D=16.7 Mpc, 1 mas = 0.080 pc), its massive black hole (~6.0 x 10^9M) and its conspicuous emission at radio wavelengths and above. We started on November 2009 a monitoring program with the e-EVN at 5 GHz, in correspondence of the season of Very High Energy (VHE) observations. Indeed, two episodes of VHE activity have been reported in February and April 2010. We present here the main results of these multi-epoch observations: the inner jet and HST-1 are both detected and resolved in our datasets. We study the apparent velocity of HST-1, which seems to be increasing since 2005, and the flux density variability in the inner jet. All in all, the radio counterpart to this year’s VHE event seems to be different from the ones in 2005 and 2008, opening new scenario for the radio-high energy connection

Safe Concurrency Introduction through Slicing

Traditional refactoring is about modifying the structure of existing code without changing its behaviour, but with the aim of making code easier to understand, modify, or reuse. In this paper, we introduce three novel refactorings for retrofitting concurrency to Erlang applications, and demonstrate how the use of program slicing makes the automation of these refactorings possible

Confidence interval estimation tasks and the economics of overconfidence

Experiments in psychology, where subjects estimate confidence intervals to a series of factual questions, have shown that individuals report far too narrow intervals. This has been interpreted as evidence of overconfidence in the preciseness of knowledge, a potentially serious violation of the rationality assumption in economics. Following these results a growing literature in economics has incorporated overconfidence in models of, for instance, financial markets. In this paper we investigate the robustness of results from confidence interval estimation tasks with respect to a number of manipulations: frequency assessments, peer frequency assessments, iteration, and monetary incentives. Our results suggest that a large share of the overconfidence in interval estimation tasks is an artifact of the response format. Using frequencies and monetary incentives reduces the measured overconfidence in the confidence interval method by about 65%. The results are consistent with the notion that subjects have a deep aversion to setting broad confidence intervals, a reluctance that we attribute to a socially rational trade-off between informativeness and accuracy

Oil spill Hazard maps

Release of the Atlantic Oil spill Hazard map Portal for dissemination. This is the reviewed version of deliverable 8.4. This document is not a technical report but a paper version of the oil spill hazard map portal (https://glamor.sincem.unibo.it), since the actual deliverable was the website release

Billiards and brains: Cognitive ability and behaviour in a p-beauty contest

Beauty contests are well-studied, dominance-solvable games that generate two interesting results. First, most behavior does not conform to the unique Nash equilibrium. Second, there is considerable unexplained heterogeneity in behavior. In this work, we evaluate the relationship between beauty contest behavior and cognitive ability. We find that subjects with high cognitive ability exhibit behavior that is closer to the Nash equlibrium. We examine this finding through the prism of economic and biological theory