Efficacy of a Self-Help Treatment for At-Risk and Pathological Gamblers

Available evidence suggests that self-help treatments may reduce problem gambling severity but inconsistencies of results across clinical trials leave the extent of their benefits unclear. Moreover, no self-help treatment has yet been validated within a French Canadian setting. The current study therefore assesses the efficacy of a French language self-help treatment including three motivational telephone interviews spread over an 11-week period and a cognitive-behavioral self-help workbook. At-risk and pathological gamblers were randomly assigned to the treatment group (n = 31) or the waiting list (n = 31). Relative to the waiting list, the treatment group showed a statistically significant reduction in the number of DSM-5 gambling disorder criteria met, gambling habits, and gambling consequences at Week 11. Perceived self-efficacy and life satisfaction also significantly improved after 11 weeks for the treatment group, but not for the waiting list group. At Week 11, 13% of participants had dropped out of the study. All significant changes reported for the treatment group were maintained throughout 1, 6 and 12-month follow-ups. Results support the efficacy of the self-help treatment to reduce problem gambling severity, gambling behaviour and to improve overall functioning among a sample of French Canadian problem gamblers over short, medium and long term. Findings from this study lend support to the appropriateness of self-help treatments for problem gamblers and help clarify inconsistencies found in the literature. The low dropout rate is discussed with respect to the advantages of the self-help format. Clinical and methodological implications of the results are put forth.     

Getting into the Groove: The Development of Tempo‐Flexibility Between 10 and 18 Months of Age

Despite good early rhythm processing abilities, and clear enjoyment of music, infants appear not to be able to spontaneously synchronize their movement to the beat of a song (Zentner and Eerola, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 2010, 5768). We present a new social bell‐ringing task designed to facilitate synchronous movement to music in infants. Ten‐month‐olds, 18‐month‐olds, and adults were played musical tracks of various tempos and given handheld bells to ring, in the presence of either a live experimenter or an animated nonsocial stimulus. Surface electromyography (EMG) was used to measure the timing of arm movements during periods of bell ringing. Infants showed no evidence of synchronous bell ringing at any tempo. However, while the 10‐month‐olds did not modulate their ringing to the music tempo, the 18‐month‐olds showed tempo‐flexibility. Moreover, 18‐month‐olds displayed more associated behaviors such as bouncing and rocking in the absence (rather than presence) of a social partner, whereas the behavior of the 10‐month‐olds was not modulated by the presence or absence of a social partner. The results suggest a distinction between “moving together” and “moving to the beat,” which may have separate underlying mechanisms and developmental trajectories.     

Do husbands and wives pool their incomes? A couple experiment

We propose a simple and direct test of in-couple income pooling and provide a typology of couples that pool resources and those who do not. For this purpose, we performed a five-round experiment with 95 established real-life couples in Germany. In each round, the couples received the same total amount of money, but the relative allocation to the spouses differed and they had to agree on an irreversible private goods consumption pattern. We find that for the majority of the sample, the consumption choices depend on the spouses’ relative resources. While this suggests a rejection of income pooling at the mean, a substantial share of the couples do indeed pool their resources. Pooling behavior is more common among couples in which the spouses’ socioeconomic characteristics are more similar. In particular, traditional couples with distinct work division between the spouses are significantly less likely to pool their individual resources and treat any spouse’s income symmetrically. Conventional variables used to approximate income pooling are only loosely related to the behavior observed in our experiment.     

Does a firm’s exposure to ethical failures matter to financial markets? A governance perspective

This paper investigates if a firm’s ethical reputation, in conjunction with its governance, affects its standing within financial markets. A firm`s ethical reputation, as measured by ethical failures, arises from its involvement in ethical violations and incidents while a comprehensive index proxies for governance. We assess a firm’s standing within financial markets through two complementary perspectives, i.e., the level of information asymmetry between managers and investors, as inferred from analyst forecast dispersion and analyst forecast error, and the relation between a firm’s earnings and its stock market valuation or return (value relevance). Our results suggest that a firm`s ethical reputation affects financial analysts’ forecasts as well as the stock market value assigned to its reported earnings. Moreover, it appears that corporate governance moderates such relations, with strong (weak) governance compensating for a weak (strong) ethical reputation. Overall, our evidence shows that ethical failures do not seem to pay.     

From Parts to Wholes: Mechanisms of Development in Infant Visual Object Processing

Visual object processing in infancy is often described as proceeding from an early stage in which object features are processed independently to a later stage in which relations between features are taken into account (e.g., Cohen, 1998). Here we present the Representational Acuity Hypothesis, which argues that this behavioral shift can be explained by a developmental decrease in the size of neural receptive fields in the cortical areas responsible for object representation, together with a tuning to specific object features. We evaluate this hypothesis with a connectionist model of infant perceptual categorization. The model shows a behavioral shift in featural to relational processing consistent with similar results observed in the infant categorization experiments of Younger (1985) and Younger and Cohen (1986).     

MODEL BUILDING AND DATA MINING

This paper defines the phenomenon of data mining in econometrics and discusses various outcomes of and solutions to data mining. Both classical and Bayesian approaches are considered, each with notable advantages and disadvantages, and with the choice of loss function affecting critical values. Illustrative examples include variable addition and exclusion in a standard linear regression model, the choice of lag structure in a dynamic single equation, and specification in a simultaneous equations model.     

Product Assortment and Price Competition under Multinomial Logit Demand

The role of assortment planning and pricing in shaping sales and profits of retailers is well documented and studied in monopolistic settings. However, such a role remains relatively unexplored in competitive environments. In this study, we study equilibrium behavior of competing retailers in two settings: (i) when prices are exogenously fixed, and retailers compete in assortments only; and (ii) when retailers compete jointly in assortment and prices. For this, we model consumer choice using a multinomial Logit, and assume that each retailer selects products from a predefined set, and faces a display constraint. We show that when the sets of products available to retailers do not overlap, there always exists one equilibrium that Pareto‐dominates all others, and that such an outcome can be reached through an iterative process of best responses. A direct corollary of our results is that competition leads a firm to offer a broader set of products compared to when it is operating as a monopolist, and to broader offerings in the market compared to a centralized planner. When some products are available to all retailers, that is, assortments might overlap, we show that display constraints drive equilibrium existence properties.