The socially organized basis of everyday ‘economic’ conduct: evidence from video recordings of real-life pre-verbal salesperson-shopper encounters in a showroom retail store

This paper reports the results of an analysis of the ways shoppers regularly occasioned (or attempted to occasion) or avoided (or attempted to avoid) verbal encounters with salespersons in a retail store. These everyday events are of vital importance for retail researchers and practitioners as they not only precede and influence but also make possible th

Reply to: Systematic Overestimation of Reflection Impulsivity in the Information Sampling Task

To the Editor: Impulsivity, a psychological construct comprising both motor and cognitive factors, is thought to underlie important interindividual differences in health and disease (1). In particular, reflection impulsivity, which refers to the tendency to gather and evaluate information before decision making (2), has been implicated in many psychiatric and neurological disorders (3, 4, 5). One of the standard tasks for measuring reflection impulsivity in healthy and clinical populations is the Information Sampling Task (IST), designed by Clark et al. (3) and included in the widely used Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) (6). In this CANTAB version of the IST, participants sample a variable amount of information about an uncertain outcome before making a decision. The amount of information sampled before the decision gives a measure of participants’ reflection impulsivity. In this correspondence, we show that the calculation of the IST’s main outcome measure, P(correct), is based on incorrect statistical inference, resulting in systematic overestimation of participants’ reflection impulsivity and potentially inflated type II error rates. This might affect the results of numerous recent psychopharmacological, neuropsychological, and psychiatric publications that have used the IST (4, 5, 7).This work was supported by a Strategic Research Initiative Grant (to CM) from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (Grant No. APP1021973 to MY

Agency over Technocracy - How Lawyer Archetypes Infect Regulatory Approaches

In this article, we look at the contested role of in-house lawyers in regulated organisations in the financial sector. A recent Financial Conduct Authority consultation on whether to designate the head of legal of banks, insurance companies and other financial firms as ‘Senior Managers’ and the decision which flowed from it, reflected a flawed view of lawyers as a neutral technocracy of mere legal technicians; we show how the FCA’s decision is potentially damaging to the public interest and failed to take into account that in-house lawyers are often important decision-makers and influencers within their organisations. We put the case for an alternative view; that in-house lawyers are professionals, with agency that requires them to act in accordance with ethical norms and means they should be made more accountable for their conduct

Complex Bounds for Real Maps

In this paper we prove complex bounds, also referred to as a priori bounds for C3, and, in particular, for analytic maps of the interval. Any C3 mapping of the interval has an asymptotically holomorphic extension to a neighbourhood of the interval. We associate to such a map, a complex box mapping, which provides a kind of Markov structure for the dynamics. Moreover, we prove universal geometric bounds on the shape of the domains and on the moduli between components of the range and domain. Such bounds show that the first return maps to these domains are well controlled, and consequently such bounds form one of the corner stones in many recent results in one-dimensional dynamics, for example: renormalization theory, rigidity, density of hyperbolicity, and local connectivity of Julia sets

Regular or stochastic dynamics in families of higher-degree unimodal maps

We construct a lamination of the space of unimodal maps with critical points of fixed degree by the hybrid classes. The structure of the lamination yields a partition of the parameter space for one-parameter real analytic families of unimodal maps and allows us to transfer a priori bounds in the phase space to the parameter space. This implies that almost every map in such a family is either regular or stochastic