Structural Relationship among Loss Aversion, Emotion, and Sport Consumption: The Case of NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Bracketology

The NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, known to fans as March Madness, is one of the most popular annual sporting events in the United States. Despite its economic impact on the sports industry, relative few studies have examined phenomena surrounding the March Madness bracket. Some (e.g., Kaplan &Garstka, 2001; McCrea &Hirt, 2009) have focused on how to make accurate predictions for the tournament. However, sports marketers need to understand why and how participants make decisions when filling out their brackets, and no studies have investigated this behavior. To fill this void, the current project was conducted to explain the decision-making process of NCAA tournament bracket participants based on loss aversion theory. Two studies were conducted. Study 1(N= 258) was to test participants’ loss aversion tendency by adopting Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) value function. Participants were grouped according to four win-loss scenarios, and the loss aversion tendency was found. The purpose of study 2 (N= 223) was to develop a framework for the emotional loss aversion tendency on the decision to choose an opposing team over a favorite team in the high likelihood of a negative game outcome between the highly identified fans and the lower identified fans

Development of an integrated model framework for multi-air-pollutant exposure assessments in high-density cities

Exposure models for some criteria of air pollutants have been intensively developed in past research; multi-air-pollutant exposure models, especially for particulate chemical species, have been however overlooked in Asia. Lack of an integrated model framework to calculate multi-air-pollutant exposure has hindered the combined exposure assessment and the corresponding health assessment. This work applied the land-use regression (LUR) approach to develop an integrated model framework to estimate 2017 annual-average exposure of multiple air pollutants in a typical high-rise and high-density Asian city (Hong Kong, China) including four criteria of gaseous air pollutants (particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter equal to or less than 10 µm (PM10) and 2.5 µm (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone (O3)), as well as four major PM10 chemical species. Our integrated multi-air-pollutant exposure model framework is capable of explaining 91 %–97 % of the variability of measured gaseous air pollutant concentration, with the leave-one-out cross-validation R2 values ranging from 0.73 to 0.93. Using the model framework, the spatial distribution of the concentration of various air pollutants at a spatial resolution of 500 m was generated. The LUR model-derived spatial distribution maps revealed weak-to-moderate spatial correlations between the PM10 chemical species and the criteria of air pollutants, which may help to distinguish their independent chronic health effects. In addition, further improvements in the development of air pollution exposure models are discussed. This study proposed an integrated model framework for estimating multi-air-pollutant exposure in high-density and high-rise urban areas, serving an important tool for multi-air-pollutant exposure assessment in epidemiological studies.</p

Instantonic approach to triple well potential

By using a usual instanton method we obtain the energy splitting due to quantum tunneling through the triple well barrier. It is shown that the term related to the midpoint of the energy splitting in propagator is quite different from that of double well case, in that it is proportional to the algebraic average of the frequencies of the left and central wells.Comment: Revtex, 11 pages, Included one eps figur

Exclusive Measurement of the Nonmesonic Weak Decay of ^{5}_{\Lambda}He Hypernucleus

We performed a coincidence measurement of two nucleons emitted from the nonmesonic weak decay (NMWD) of ^{5}_{\Lambda}He formed via the ^{6}Li(\pi^+,K^+) reaction. The energies of two nucleons and the pair number distributions in the opening angle between them were measured. In both np and nn pairs, we observed a clean back-to-back correlation coming from the two-body decay of \Lambda p --> n p and \Lambda n --> n n, respectively. The ratio of the nucleon pair numbers was N_{nn}/N_{np}=0.45 \pm 0.11(stat)\pm 0.03(syst) in the kinematic region of cos(theta_{NN}) < -0.8. Since each decay mode was exclusively detected, the measured ratio should be close to the ratio of \Gamma(\Lambda p --> np)/\Gamma(\Lambda n --> nn). The ratio is consistent with recent theoretical calculations based on the heavy meson/direct quark exchange picture.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. lett., 4 pages, 3 figure

Proton asymmetry in non-mesonic weak decay of light hypernuclei

We have obtained the decay asymmetry parameters in non-mesonic weak decay of polarized Lambda-hypernuclei by measuring the proton asymmetry. The polarized Lambda-hypernuclei, 5_Lambda-He, 12_Lambda-C, and 11_Lambda-B, were produced in high statistics via the (pi^+,k^+) reaction at 1.05 GeV/c in the forward angles. Preliminary analysis shows that the decay asymmetry parameters are very small for these s-shell and p-shell hypernuclei.Comment: 4pages, 4figures, International Conference on Hypernuclear and Strange Particle Physics (HYP2003