Operationalizing a Behavioral Finance Risk Model: A Theoretical and Empirical Framework

To keep up with the rather fast-growing interest in the discipline of Behavioral Finance and Economics caused in part by the new realities of the post-200S world, and the realities prevailing over three decades before and leading up to that year- there is a discernible need for the production of new generations of testable and yet more realistic models and theories as guides for financial and economic decision makers everywhere. The present work is one such attempt in that direction. This writing first improves upon a recently developed, and real-life-inspired, Behavioral Finance Risk Model (Yazdipour, 2011) and then offers a specific methodology for testing it

Barriers to parental care seeking behavior for children’s oral health among low income parents

Objectives. We identified psychosocial, structural, and cultural barriers to seeking dental care among nonutilizing caregivers of Medicaid-enrolled children.Methods. We used Medicaid utilization records to identify utilizing and nonutilizing African American and White caregivers of Medicaid-enrolled children in Jefferson County, Kentucky. We conducted 8 focus groups (N=76) with a stratified random sample of responding caregivers; transcripts were qualitatively analyzed.Results. Psychosocial factors associated with utilization included oral health beliefs, norms of caregiver responsibility, and positive caregiver dental experiences. Utilizing groups reported higher education; health beliefs included identifying oral health with overall health and professional preventive dental care with caregiver responsibility for children’s overall health. These beliefs may mediate shared structural barriers, including transportation, school absence policies, discriminatory treatment, and difficulty locating providers who accept Medicaid. Expectation of poor oral health among some low-income caregivers was among factors identified with nonutilization.Conclusions. Disadvantaged caregivers reported multiple barriers to accessing dental care for their children. Providers, Medicaid administrators, and schools must coordinate steps to encourage caregiver-controlled dental care, build trust, and link professional preventive dental care with caregiver responsibility for children’s overall health

Frequency formats, probability formats, or problem structure? A test of the nested-sets hypothesis in an extensional reasoning task

Five experiments addressed a controversy in the probability judgment literature that centers on the efficacy of framing probabilities as frequencies. The natural frequency view predicts that frequency formats attenuate errors, while the nested-sets view predicts that highlighting the set-subset structure of the problem reduces error, regardless of problem format. This study tested these predictions using a conjunction task. Previous studies reporting that frequency formats reduced conjunction errors confounded reference class with problem format. After controlling this confound, the present study's findings show that conjunction errors can be reduced using either a probability or a frequency format, that frequency effects depend upon the presence of a reference class, and that frequency formats do not promote better statistical reasoning than probability formats.probability judgment, nested-sets, conjunction fallacy, frequency format, probability format.