The Role of Prior Beliefs in Decisions from Experience

This paper points to the importance of prior beliefs in understanding the gap between decisions from experience and decisions from description. It puts forward a two-stage account that effectively incorporates prior beliefs into the examination of decisions from experience. The two-stage account assumes that (1) the subjective probabilities are estimated in a Bayesian manner, combining prior beliefs with observations, and (2) the estimated probabilities are transformed by probability weighting. The first stage provides a Bayesian explanation for the commonly found overestimation of infrequent outcomes, and an empirically appealing way to deal with always – or never – observed outcomes. A source dependent probability weighting in the second stage captures deviations from Bayesian rationality under experienced uncertainty. The two-stage model is tested by reanalyzing the data sets in Glöckner et al. (2016), as well as the famous Technion Prediction Competition data set of Erev et al. (2010). Model comparisons using BIC scores indicate that the two-stage model performs better than the single stage model approximating subjective probabilities with observed relative frequencies. The estimation results show that the two-stage model can accommodate both the classic and the reversed description – experience gap

Are Black Swans Really Ignored?

This paper investigates the often-discussed over – and under – weighting of rare and extreme events – so called “black swans” – in decisions from experience (DFE). We first resolve the problem of lack of control over experienced probabilities by adjusting the common sampling paradigm of DFE. Our experimental design also controls for utility and uncertainty of experienced probabilities (ambiguity). This enables us to exactly identify the deviations from Expected Utility due to over – or under – weighting of probabilities under risk. Our results confirm the well-known gap between DFE and traditional decisions from description (DFD) but do not provide evidence for underweighting of small probabilities in DFE. We found that experience leads to less pronounced overweighting of small probabilities, and less pronounced underweighting of large probabilities. Thus, our findings suggest a clear de-biasing effect of sampling experience: it attenuates – rather than reverses – the commonly found inverse S-shaped probability weighting in DFD

Character education

In this study, the subject of character and character education, which has taken on a great significance in Europe and the USA during the last years and become the biggest problem of modem people, is considered. As a result of growth of negative development tendencies in the world that affect an individual, the subjects of the necessity of character education and the duties of family and society are among the themes, being investigated. Besides, the role of schools in the development of individuals' characters, where and how character education is to be held, the duties of teachers and school administrators are considered in this work. In the article there are particular suggestions of the way, how character education should be performed

Decisions from Experience and from Description: Beliefs and Probability Weighting

Decisions from description typically concern risk in the literature on decision making. It is identified as a case where outcome probabilities are objectively known. Decisions from experience, on the other hand, represent a case of ambiguity. Here, the outcome probabilities are not known objectively but they are subjectively inferred based on observations. As in many real life situations, probabilistic inference and information search are integral parts of decisions from experience. This dissertation explores behavioral differences between decisions from experience and from description by focusing on the role of (1) probability weighting, and (2) subjective beliefs. _Chapter 2_ investigates the impact of experience on probability weighting. _Chapter 3_ points out the role of prior beliefs in accounting for decisions from experience. _Chapter 4_ introduces a non-Bayesian model of updating which accommodates common biases in probabilistic inference. _Chapter 5_ reports results of a laboratory experiment testing Prelec’s (1998) theory of probability weightin

Quality assurance implementation in TUSAS Aerospace Industries Inc (TAI)

Ankara : The Department of Management and the Graduate School of Business Administration of Bilkent Univ., 1993.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1993.Includes bibliographical references leaves 127-131.TAI established for F-16 aircraft production, is a unique organization in Turkey. Hiough it is a Turkish company TAI operates within an mtemational cliain in production and manages a Quality Assurance System tliat satisfies strict quality requirements. TAI is also trying to implement Total Quality Management. This thesis is prepared for studying Quality Assurance Management in TAI and to identify the areas of improvement for decreasing cost without jeopardizing quality.Aydogan, Alp IM.S

Signal perception and belief updating

This paper introduces a theory of signal perception to study how people update their beliefs. By allowing perceived signals to deviate from actual signals, we identify the probability that people miss or misread signals, giving indices of conservatism and confirmatory bias. In an experiment, we elicited perceived signals from choices and obtained a structural estimation of the indices. The subjects were conservative and acted as if they missed 65% of the signals they received. Also they exhibited confirmatory bias by misreading 17% of the signals contradicting their prior beliefs

Reactive Molecular Dynamics study on the first steps of DNA-damage by free hydroxyl radicals

We employ a large scale molecular simulation based on bond-order ReaxFF to simulate the chemical reaction and study the damage to a large fragment of DNA-molecule in the solution by ionizing radiation. We illustrate that the randomly distributed clusters of diatomic OH-radicals that are primary products of megavoltage ionizing radiation in water-based systems are the main source of hydrogen-abstraction as well as formation of carbonyl- and hydroxyl-groups in the sugar-moiety that create holes in the sugar-rings. These holes grow up slowly between DNA-bases and DNA-backbone and the damage collectively propagate to DNA single and double strand break.Comment: 6 pages and 8 figures. movies and simulations are available at: http://qmsimulator.wordpress.com