Social Media In Sports: Can Professional Sports League Commissioners Punish \u27Twackle Dummies\u27?

Daniel J. Friedman writes an article discussing the rise and popularity in social media use by professional athletes. He then discusses some of the new problems that have arisen due to social media misuse and the power of the Commissioner to restrict and punish the players for misuse. The article culminates with a case study hypothetical related to content based social media misuse and whether the Commissioners of professional sports league can punish a player for the content of their social media messages

Equilibrium Vengeance

The efficiency-enhancing role of the vengeance motive is illustrated in a simple social dilemma game in extensive form. Incorporating behavioral noise and observational noise in random interactions in large groups leads to seven continuous families of (short run) Perfect Bayesian equilibria (PBE) that involve both vengeful and non-vengeful types. A new long run evolutionary equilibrium concept, Evolutionary Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium (EPBE), shrinks the equilibrium set to two points. In one EPBE, only the non-vengeful type survives and there are no mutual gains. In the other EPBE, both types survive and reap mutual gains.reciprocity; vengeance; evolutionary perfect Bayesian equilibrium; social dilemmas

Equilibrium Vengeance

This paper introduces two ideas, emotional state dependent utility components (ESDUCs), and evolutionary perfect Bayesian equilibrium (EPBE). Using a simple extensive form game, we illustrate the efficiency-enhancing role of a powerful ESDUC, the vengeance motive. Incorporating behavioral noise and observational noise leads to a range of (short run) Perfect Bayesian equilibria (PBE) involving both vengeful and non-vengeful types. We then derive two (long run) EPBE, one where both types survive and reap mutual gains, and a second where only the non-vengeful type survives and there are no mutual gains.negative reciprocity, perfect Bayesian equilibrium, evolutionary perfect Bayesian equilibrium, emotional state dependent utility

Vengefulness Evolves in Small Groups

We discuss how small group interactions overcome evolutionary problems that might otherwise erode vengefulness as a preference trait. The basic viability problem is that the fitness benefits of vengeance often do not cover its personal cost. Even when a sufficiently high level of vengefulness brings increased fitness, at lower levels, vengefulness has a negative fitness gradient. This leads to the threshold problem: how can vengefulness become established in the first place? If it somehow becomes established at a high level, vengefulness creates an attractive niche for cheap imitators, those who look like highly vengeful types but do not bear the costs. This is the mimicry problem, and unchecked it could eliminate vengeful traits. We show how within-group social norms can solve these problems even when encounters with outsiders are also important.

Financial Engineering and Rationality: Experimental Evidence Based on the Monty Hall Problem

Financial engineering often involves redefining existing financial assets to create new financial products. This paper investigates whether financial engineering can alter the environment so that irrational agents can quickly learn to be rational. The specific environment we investigate is based on the Monty Hall problem, a well-studied choice anomaly. Our results show that, by the end of the experiment, the majority of subjects understand the Monty Hall anomaly. Average valuation of the experimental asset is very close to the expected value based on the true probabilities.experiment, behavioral finance

Risky Curves: From Unobservable Utility to Observable Opportunity Sets

Most theories of risky choice postulate that a decision maker maximizes the expectation of a Bernoulli (or utility or similar) function. We tour 60 years of empirical search and conclude that no such functions have yet been found that are useful for out-of-sample prediction. Nor do we find practical applications of Bernoulli functions in major risk-based industries such as finance, insurance and gambling. We sketch an alternative approach to modeling risky choice that focuses on potentially observable opportunities rather than on unobservable Bernoulli functions.Expected utility, Risk aversion, St. Petersburg Paradox, Decisions under uncertainty, Option theory

Device-independent Certification of One-shot Distillable Entanglement

Entanglement sources that produce many entangled states act as a main component in applications exploiting quantum physics such as quantum communication and cryptography. Realistic sources are inherently noisy, cannot run for an infinitely long time, and do not necessarily behave in an independent and identically distributed manner. An important question then arises -- how can one test, or certify, that a realistic source produces high amounts of entanglement? Crucially, a meaningful and operational solution should allow us to certify the entanglement which is available for further applications after performing the test itself (in contrast to assuming the availability of an additional source which can produce more entangled states, identical to those which were tested). To answer the above question and lower bound the amount of entanglement produced by an uncharacterised source, we present a protocol that can be run by interacting classically with uncharacterised (but not entangled to one another) measurement devices used to measure the states produced by the source. A successful run of the protocol implies that the remaining quantum state has high amounts of one-shot distillable entanglement. That is, one can distill many maximally entangled states out of the single remaining state. Importantly, our protocol can tolerate noise and, thus, certify entanglement produced by realistic sources. With the above properties, the protocol acts as the first "operational device-independent entanglement certification protocol" and allows one to test and benchmark uncharacterised entanglement sources which may be otherwise incomparable

Issues in Evaluating Health Department Web-Based Data Query Systems: Working Papers

Compiles papers on conceptual and methodological topics to consider in evaluating state health department systems that provide aggregate data online, such as taxonomy, logic models, indicators, and design. Includes surveys and examples of evaluations

Speculative Attacks: A Laboratory Study in Continuous Time

We examine speculative attacks in a controlled laboratory environment featuring continuous time, size asymmetries, and varying amounts of public information. Attacks succeeded in 233 of 344 possible cases. When speculators have symmetric size and access to information: (a) weaker fundamentals increase the likelihood of successful speculative attacks and hasten their onset, and (b) contrary to some theory, success is enhanced by public access to information about either the net speculative position or the fundamentals. The presence of a larger speculator further enhances success, and experience with large speculators increases small speculators’ response to the public information. However, giving the large speculator increased size or better information does not significantly strengthen his impact.currency crisis, speculative attack, laboratory experiment, coordination game, pre-emption, large player