An Investigation into Appraisal Bias: The Role of Decision Support Tools in Debiasing Valuation Judgments

Given the nature of the valuation task environment appraisers are often made aware of previous value opinions rendered by appraisers, commonly in the form of an historic appraisal. And, because an appraisal task involves the rendering of market value, a hypothetical, unobservable construct based on probabilities, direct feedback against this objective is typically not possible. Alternate signals derived from the task environment such as confirmation of previous appraised values may be employed, thereby potentially altering the appraiser’s perception of the valuation objective leading to divergence from the normative model. The real estate behavioral literature suggests commercial appraisers have been susceptible to anonymous value opinions of experts, often times resulting in biased valuation judgments. This research is the first to focus on decision support tools as a technique to eliminate systematic biases in the appraisal process. The study focuses on the value opinion of an anonymous expert as a source of potential bias, because the value opinion of an anonymous expert is a common non-sanctioned source of influence representing a clear departure in the normative appraisal process. To operationalize the research hypotheses a two-factor randomized experiment to investigate the stated research hypotheses was conducted

Role of Hsp70 in Multiple Sclerosis: An Overview

For many years heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70) was considered exclusively an intracellular chaperone contributing to protein proteostasis and in apoptotic pathway block. Lately it has been demonstrated that Hsp70 is actively released in the extracellular environment, thereby promoting the activation of the immune system by stimulating innate and adaptive responses through the activation of APCs. Its expression in the nervous system is induced in a variety of pathological conditions. Emerging evidences displayed that Hsp70 is a critical regulator in normal neural cells. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system (CNS) directed against myelin antigens. In this review, we focus our attention on the possible protective or detrimental Hsp70 role in multiple sclerosis. A better comprehension will be useful to take advantage of its potential as a therapeutic target