How Anxiety Leads to Suboptimal Decisions Under Risky Choice Situations

The current research proposes that situationally activated anxiety—whether incidental or integral—impairs decision making. In particular, we theorize that anxiety drives decisionmakers to more heavily emphasize subjective anecdotal information in their decision making, at the expense of more factual statistical information—a deleterious heuristic called the anecdotal bias. Four studies provide consistent support for this assertion. Studies 1A and 1B feature field experiments that demonstrate the role of incidental anxiety in enhancing the anecdotal bias in a choice context. Study 2 builds on these findings, manipulating individuals’ incidental anxiety and showing how this affects the anecdotal bias in the context of message evaluations. Study 2 also provides direct evidence that only high‐arousal negative emotions such as anxiety/worry enhance the anecdotal bias, not just any negative emotion (e.g., sadness). While the first three studies examine how incidental anxiety impacts choice, the last study demonstrates the effect of integral anxiety on decision making, manipulating anxiety by intensifying participants’ perceived risk. Our results show that—consistent with findings from our first three studies—the anecdotal bias is enhanced when anxiety is heightened by individuals’ perception of risk.     

Criteria for evaluating qualitative studies

Many countries are becoming increasingly reliant upon an aging workforce. Yet, much literature positions older workers as ‘last resort’ employees, held in low esteem by employers whose preference for youth extends into decision-making about workplace engagement and support. As part of a broader study on maintaining the competence of older workers, we investigated the extent to which a group of employees in Australia aged 45 or more perceived they were discriminated against because of their age, including access to training, promotion opportunities and job security. Against expectations arising from the literature, informants reported little in the way of explicit age-related bias in their employment, opportunities for advancement and further development. Although the informants have particular characteristics and featured paraprofessional and professional workers, the contrast is noteworthy between what is reported in the literature and often premised on surveys, and our data were based on interviews. The findings indicate a need to be wary of making easy generalizations about the extent to which older workers per se are discriminated against in the workplace, while at the same time acknowledging that such discrimination exists, and perhaps for particular kinds of workers. In addition, we found a range of nuanced responses that suggest there are tensions between discriminations policies and practice that are a challenge for human resource development professionals.     

Aberration of the Citation

Multiple inherent biases related to different citation practices (for e.g., self-citations, negative citations, wrong citations, multi-authorship-biased citations, honorary citations, circumstantial citations, discriminatory citations, selective and arbitrary citations, etc.) make citation-based bibliometrics strongly flawed and defective measures. A paper can be highly cited for a while (for e.g., under circumstantial or transitional knowledge), but years later it may appear that its findings, paradigms, or theories were untrue or invalid anymore. By contrast, a paper may remain shelved or overlooked for years or decades, but new studies or discoveries may actualize its subject at any moment. As citation-based metrics are transformed into “commercial activities,” the “citation credit” should be considered on a commercial basis too, in the sense that “citation credit” should be shared out as a “citation dividend” by shareholders (coauthors) averagely or proportionally to their contributions but not fully appropriated by each of them. At equal numbers of citations, the greater number of authors, the lower “citation credit” should be and vice versa. Overlooking the presence of distorted and subjective citation practices makes many people and administrators “obsessed” with the number of citations to such an extent to run after “highly cited” authors and to create specialized citation databases for commercial purposes. Citation-based bibliometrics, however, are unreliable and unscientific measures; citation counts do not mean that a more cited work is of a higher quality or accuracy than a less cited work because citations do not measure the quality or accuracy. Citations do not mean that a highly cited author or journal is more commendable than a less cited author or journal. Citations are not more than countable numbers: no more, no less.     

Environmental Risk Assessors as Honest Brokers or Stealth Advocates

Risk assessment ought to provide a solid, evidence base to risk management in the development of environmental policy and decisions, where the risk assessors act without advocacy as honest brokers of science advice. But there are concerns that the values of the risk assessors might undermine the objectivity of the process. For similar reasons, there is suspicion that more interaction between risk assessors and risk managers might contaminate the science. On the contrary, here the argument is that making risk assessment more management‐ and value‐relevant, through more effective dialogue, provides a better foundation for objective science advice.     

Bias reduction of the maximum-likelihood estimator for a conditional Gaussian MA(1) model

In this paper, we consider an estimation for the unknown parameters of a conditional Gaussian MA(1) model. In the majority of cases, a maximum-likelihood estimator is chosen because the estimator is consistent. However, for small sample sizes the error is large, because the estimator has a bias of O(n^{? 1}). Therefore, we provide a bias of O(n^{? 1}) for the maximum-likelihood estimator for the conditional Gaussian MA(1) model. Moreover, we propose new estimators for the unknown parameters of the conditional Gaussian MA(1) model based on the bias of O(n^{? 1}). We investigate the properties of the bias, as well as the asymptotical variance of the maximum-likelihood estimators for the unknown parameters, by performing some simulations. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of the new estimators through this simulation study.     

Identification and Efficient Estimation of Simultaneous Equations Network Models

This article considers identification and estimation of social network models in a system of simultaneous equations. We show that, with or without row-normalization of the social adjacency matrix, the network model has different equilibrium implications, needs different identification conditions, and requires different estimation strategies. When the adjacency matrix is not row-normalized, the variation in the Bonacich centrality across nodes in a network can be used as an IV to identify social interaction effects and improve estimation efficiency. The number of such IVs depends on the number of networks. When there are many networks in the data, the proposed estimators may have an asymptotic bias due to the presence of many IVs. We propose a bias-correction procedure for the many-instrument bias. Simulation experiments show that the bias-corrected estimators perform well in finite samples. We also provide an empirical example to illustrate the proposed estimation procedure.     

接收机钟差灰色马尔可夫预测模型研究

将灰色理论与马尔可夫链相结合,提出了基于灰色马尔可夫链的接收机钟差预测模型。首先根据灰色理论对钟差序列数据进行拟合以及初步预测,然后以拟合曲线为基础划分状态空间,通过马尔可夫状态转移概率矩阵对初步预测值进行修正。在预测过程中,不断引入最新数据并剔除最旧数据,对模型进行实时更新,以进一步提高预测精度。实例计算验证了该模型的有效性与可行性。     

政治的偏向:东周诸子传播思想研究

在东周,诸子都不约而同地倚重口传文化。他们在口传媒介中发现真理与传播思想,并明显呈现出一种普遍的政治关怀。换言之,东周诸子基于国家的立场,力图把自己变成政治思想的"说话人",并对口头传播赋予严格的伦理规约与道德规范。作为政治传播主体的东周诸子对口传文化非同寻常地虔诚与敬畏,它不仅见证口头传播的理性精神与实践效力,还表现出被信赖与宽容的政治偏向。洞悉东周诸子"舌尖上的政治"有补于当代新媒体传播的策略选择以及政治传播的文化建设。     

心理异质对前景博弈策略选择影响研究

传统博弈论以期望效用理论为基础,具有一定的局限性。前景理论是刻画风险及不确定环境下决策的最佳工具。考虑心理异质性对决策行为的影响,将前景理论中的参考依赖、敏感性递减、认知偏差、损失规避等纳入博弈分析框架中,构建局中人的前景函数,求解前景博弈混合策略纳什均衡,并将其与传统博弈混合策略纳什均衡对比,发现前景博弈能有效刻画出心理异质性对个体策略选择的影响机理,从而成功地解释一些传统博弈难以解释的现象。     

Trends,Age Patterns and Differentials in Childhood Mortality in Haiti (1960–1987)

This paper examines the trends, patterns and differentials in childhood mortality in Haiti between 1960 and 1987 with data from three surveys and one census. Data comparability is maximized by a series of adjustments, and both direct and indirect techniques are applied. The results indicate that a slow decline in childhood mortality has occurred since 1960 for the country as a whole. Neonatal survival has shown impressive gains, especially in rural Haiti. Post-neonatal mortality has not, however, declined at the same rate. Mortality between the ages of one and five years has declined at about the same pace as infant mortality, maintaining consistency with model patterns of mortality change. The overall national decline in child mortality appears to have consisted of two phases. The first occurred in rural Haiti during the late 1960s and early 1970s and was due largely to a fall in neonatal mortality. The second phase of the decline was concentrated in Port-au-Prince, and seems to have affected all ages of childhood.