The Rhetoric of Neutrality and the Philosophers’ Brief: A Critique of the Amicus Brief of Six Moral Philosophers in Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill

Church discusses the amicus brief to the US Supreme Court in the companion assisted suicide cases of Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill, in which six philosophers offer their views. The philosophers\u27 charge--that prohibiting physician-assisted suicide can only be based on impermissible sectarian religious or ethical premises--can be raised against their neutral liberal argument itself

Bubbles in experimental asset markets: Irrational exuberance no more

The robustness of bubbles and crashes in markets for finitely lived assets is perplexing. This paper reports the results of experimental asset markets in which participants trade two assets. In some markets, price bubbles form. In these markets, traders will pay even higher prices for the asset with lottery characteristics, i.e., a claim on a large, unlikely payoff. However, institutional design has a significant impact on deviations in prices from fundamental values, particularly for an asset with lottery characteristics. Price run-ups and crashes are moderated when traders finance purchases of the assets themselves and are allowed to short sell.Financial markets ; Risk

Emotion and financial markets

Psychologists and economists hold vastly different views about human behavior. Psychologists contend that economists' models bear little relation to actual behavior. This view is supported by a large body of psychological research that shows that emotional state can significantly affect decision making. ; Economists, on the other hand, argue that psychological studies have no theoretical basis and offer little empirical evidence about people's decision-making processes. The reigning financial economics paradigm-the efficient market hypothesis (EMH)-assumes that individuals make rational investment decisions using the rules of probability and statistics. A newer branch of financial economics called behavioral finance applies lessons from psychology to financial decision making, but most of these studies have focused on cognitive biases rather than emotion. ; The authors of this article argue that emotion has important, and possibly beneficial, influences on financial behavior. After defining the term emotion and describing how emotions can be categorized, the authors consider how emotions influence human behavior. The discussion focuses particularly on three aspects of emotion and financial decision making: emotional disposition and stock market pricing, the feeling of regret, and investors' emotional response to information. ; No new financial economics paradigm that incorporates behavioral influences and better models actual behavior has yet emerged to replace the EMH. Yet the authors believe that emotional behavior's influence on financial decision making should be taken into account in future research.Financial markets

A comparison of consumer behavior of coin laundry users and beliefs about this behavior held by coin laundry owners

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston Universit

Supernova enrichment and dynamical histories of solar-type stars in clusters

We use N-body simulations of star cluster evolution to explore the hypothesis that short-lived radioactive isotopes found in meteorites, such as 26-Al, were delivered to the Sun's protoplanetary disc from a supernova at the epoch of Solar System formation. We cover a range of star cluster formation parameter space and model both clusters with primordial substructure, and those with smooth profiles. We also adopt different initial virial ratios - from cool, collapsing clusters to warm, expanding associations. In each cluster we place the same stellar population; the clusters each have 2100 stars, and contain one massive 25M_Sun star which is expected to explode as a supernova at about 6.6Myr. We determine the number of Solar (G)-type stars that are within 0.1 - 0.3pc of the 25M_Sun star at the time of the supernova, which is the distance required to enrich the protoplanetary disc with the 26-Al abundances found in meteorites. We then determine how many of these G-dwarfs are unperturbed `singletons'; stars which are never in close binaries, nor suffer sub-100au encounters, and which also do not suffer strong dynamical perturbations. The evolution of a suite of twenty initially identical clusters is highly stochastic, with the supernova enriching over 10 G-dwarfs in some clusters, and none at all in others. Typically only ~25 per cent of clusters contain enriched, unperturbed singletons, and usually only 1 - 2 per cluster (from a total of 96 G-dwarfs in each cluster). The initial conditions for star formation do not strongly affect the results, although a higher fraction of supervirial (expanding) clusters would contain enriched G-dwarfs if the supernova occurred earlier than 6.6Myr. If we sum together simulations with identical initial conditions, then ~1 per cent of all G-dwarfs in our simulations are enriched, unperturbed singletons.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA