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Puzzle
Selected AbstractsSUBJECTIVE PROBABILITIES IN GAMES: AN APPLICATION TO THE OVERBIDDING PUZZLE,INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 4 2009Olivier Armantier This article illustrates how the joint elicitation of subjective probabilities and preferences may help us understand behavior in games. We conduct an experiment to test whether biased probabilistic beliefs may explain overbidding in first-price auctions. The experimental outcomes indicate that subjects underestimate their probability of winning the auction, and indeed overbid. When provided with feedback on the precision of their predictions, subjects learn to make better predictions, and to curb significantly overbidding. The structural estimation of different behavioral models suggests that biased probabilistic beliefs are a driving force behind overbidding, and that risk aversion plays a lesser role than previously believed. [source] TESTING LONG-HORIZON PREDICTIVE ABILITY WITH HIGH PERSISTENCE, AND THE MEESE,ROGOFF PUZZLE*INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 1 2005Barbara Rossi A well-known puzzle in international finance is that a random walk predicts exchange rates better than economic models. I offer a potential explanation. When exchange rates and fundamentals are highly persistent, long-horizon forecasts of economic models are biased by the estimation error. When this bias is big, a random walk will forecast better, even if the economic model is true. I propose a test for equal predictability in the presence of high persistence. It shows that the poor forecasting ability of economic models does not imply that the models are not good descriptions of the data. [source] THE PUZZLE OF FALLIBLE KNOWLEDGEMETAPHILOSOPHY, Issue 3 2008HAMID VAHID Abstract: Although the fallible/infallible distinction in the theory of knowledge has traditionally been upheld by most epistemologists, almost all contemporary theories of knowledge claim to be fallibilist. Fallibilists have, however, been forced to accommodate knowledge of necessary truths. This has proved to be a daunting task, not least because there is as yet no consensus on how the fallible/infallible divide is to be understood. In this article, after examining and rejecting a number of representative accounts of the notion of fallible knowledge, I argue that the main problems with these accounts actually stem from the very coherence of that notion. I then claim that the distinction is best understood in terms of the externalist/internalist conceptions of knowledge. Finally, I seek to garner some independent support for the proposal by highlighting some of its consequences, including its surprising bearing on certain recent and seemingly distant controversies involving issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind. [source] DOES ,AGGREGATION BIAS' EXPLAIN THE PPP PUZZLE?PACIFIC ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 1 2005Shiu-Sheng Chen This paper re-examines aggregation bias. It clarifies the meaning of aggregation bias and its applicability to the PPP puzzle; demonstrates that the size of the ,bias' is much smaller than suggested if explosive roots in the simulations are ruled out; and shows that the presence of non-persistent measurement error data can make price series appear less persistent than they are. After correcting for small-sample bias, half-life estimates indicate that heterogeneity and aggregation bias do not help to solve the PPP puzzle. [source] THE PURCHASING POWER PARITY PERSISTENCE PUZZLE: EVIDENCE FROM BLACK MARKET REAL EXCHANGE RATES,THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL, Issue 4 2008MARIO CERRATO In this paper we analyse the purchasing power parity (PPP) persistence puzzle using a unique data set of black market real exchange rates for 36 emerging market economies and (exact and approximate) median unbiased univariate and panel estimation methods. We construct bootstrap confidence intervals for the half-lives, as well as exact quantiles of the median function for different significance levels using Monte Carlo simulation. Even after accounting for a number of econometric issues, the PPP persistence puzzle is still a striking characteristic of the majority of emerging market countries. However, in a minority of exchange rates, the PPP puzzle is removed. [source] There is No Puzzle about ChangeDIALECTICA, Issue 1 2009Pablo Rychter This paper argues against the common practice of presenting perdurantism, endurantism, and other views about persistence and time as solutions to an alleged puzzle about change. Various recent attempts to generate a puzzle about change are examined and found unsuccessful. This does not mean, however, that the relevant views about persistence and time are not well motivated, but rather that their interest and purpose is independent of their suitability for solving the alleged puzzle. [source] Neoclassical Finance, Alternative Finance and the Closed End Fund PuzzleEUROPEAN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2002Steven A. Ross First page of article [source] Externalism and Self-Knowledge: A Puzzle in Two DimensionsEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, Issue 1 2004Jordi Fernández First page of article [source] Stock Price Response to Calls of Convertible Bonds: Still a Puzzle?FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2007Ivan E. Brick The liquidity hypothesis predicts negative abnormal returns around the conversion-forcing call announcements of convertible bonds, followed by a price recovery. We find the former but not the latter. The liquidity hypothesis also implies that the abnormal returns during the announcement and the post-announcement periods should be related to proxies for the stock s liquidity. Again, our findings do not support these implications of the liquidity hypothesis. We conclude that the reason for the negative abnormal returns around the announcement of a conversion-forcing call needs further examination. [source] Industrial Policy and the East German Productivity PuzzleGERMAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 3 2000Henning Klodt Catching-up of East German productivity to West German levels has completely faded out since the mid-1990s. The remaining productivity gap cannot be attributed to an inferior capital endowment or qualification deficiencies of the East German labor force. Instead, it appears to be the result of an inappropriate design of industrial policy which concentrated on the subsidization of physical capital and largely ignored the advance of human capital- and service-intensive industrial structures. East Germany will have to face another wave of painful structural adjustment when capital-intensive industries are no longer protected from competition by public subsidies. [source] One Piece of the Puzzle: Individual Leadership and EU Foreign Policy DevelopmentINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 4 2008Markus Thiel No abstract is available for this article. [source] Yeast Programmed Cell Death: An Intricate PuzzleIUBMB LIFE, Issue 3 2005P. Ludovico Abstract Yeasts as eukaryotic microorganisms with simple, well known and tractable genetics, have long been powerful model systems for studying complex biological phenomena such as the cell cycle or vesicle fusion. Until recently, yeast has been assumed as a cellular 'clean room' to study the interactions and the mechanisms of action of mammalian apoptotic regulators. However, the finding of an endogenous programmed cell death (PCD) process in yeast with an apoptotic phenotype has turned yeast into an 'unclean' but even more powerful model for apoptosis research. Yeast cells appear to possess an endogenous apoptotic machinery including its own regulators and pathway(s). Such machinery may not exactly recapitulate that of mammalian systems but it represents a simple and valuable model which will assist in the future understanding of the complex connections between apoptotic and non-apoptotic mammalian PCD pathways. Following this line of thought and in order to validate and make the most of this promising cell death model, researchers must undoubtedly address the following issues: what are the crucial yeast PCD regulators? How do they play together? What are the cell death pathways shared by yeast and mammalian PCD? Solving these questions is currently the most pressing challenge for yeast cell death researchers.IUBMB Life, 57: 129-135, 2005 [source] A Puzzle about Consent in Research and in PracticeJOURNAL OF APPLIED PHILOSOPHY, Issue 3 2010ERIC CHWANG abstract In this paper, I will examine a puzzling discrepancy between the way clinicians are allowed to treat their patients and the way researchers are allowed to treat their subjects: in certain cases, researchers are legally required to disclose quite a bit more information when obtaining consent from prospective subjects than clinicians are when obtaining consent from prospective patients. I will argue that the proper resolution of this puzzling discrepancy must appeal to a pragmatic criterion of disclosure for informed consent: that what needs to be disclosed in order for consent to be valid depends on what the patient/subject needs to know in order to make a decision. I will then use this pragmatic criterion of disclosure to argue that when obtaining consent researchers should be permitted to omit the same information clinicians are, given certain qualifications. I will also examine how this puzzle forces us to confront some perhaps surprising truths about valid consent. My broader aim in this paper is to examine, not so much the puzzle itself, but rather what this particular puzzle can teach us about more theoretical issues surrounding informed consent. [source] A Puzzle about OntologyNOUS, Issue 2 2005Thomas Hofweber First page of article [source] School Kids and Oil Rigs: Two More Pieces of the Post-Katrina Puzzle in New OrleansAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2010Kelly Frailing Shortly after Hurricane Katrina's landfall in August 2005 and the reports of rampant looting of businesses in the city, we became curious about the extent of Katrina looting as compared to that after other major storms that hit New Orleans in 1947 and in 1965. Using burglary as a proxy variable for looting, we discovered that the burglary rates in the month before and the month after Katrina were significantly higher than those before and after the other two hurricanes. We then investigated the socioeconomic conditions in the city in an effort to explain these numbers. Population loss and high unemployment rates, coupled with a decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs and an increase in low-wage food and hotel service jobs generated severe economic inequality in the city that exacerbated the situation created by Katrina. Our current analysis of the impact of public school desegregation and the oil bust suggests that both events contributed to population loss and the increase in low-wage jobs prior to the storm. We believe that this type of research can assist in the recovery of New Orleans by providing an understanding of the city's pre-Katrina social and economic conditions and make clearer which post-Katrina changes are desirable. [source] A Simple Explanation of the Forecast Combination Puzzle,OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS & STATISTICS, Issue 3 2009Jeremy Smith Abstract This article presents a formal explanation of the forecast combination puzzle, that simple combinations of point forecasts are repeatedly found to outperform sophisticated weighted combinations in empirical applications. The explanation lies in the effect of finite-sample error in estimating the combining weights. A small Monte Carlo study and a reappraisal of an empirical study by Stock and Watson [Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Economic Quarterly (2003) Vol. 89/3, pp. 71,90] support this explanation. The Monte Carlo evidence, together with a large-sample approximation to the variance of the combining weight, also supports the popular recommendation to ignore forecast error covariances in estimating the weight. [source] AJH Hematology Crossword Puzzle, August 2010,AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HEMATOLOGY, Issue 8 2010David P. Steensma No abstract is available for this article. [source] AJH Hematology Crossword Puzzle, June 2010AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HEMATOLOGY, Issue 6 2010Article first published online: 25 MAY 2010 No abstract is available for this article. [source] AJH Hematology Crossword Puzzle, May 2010AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HEMATOLOGY, Issue 5 2010You have free access to this content No abstract is available for this article. [source] AJH Hematology Crossword Puzzle, April 2010AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HEMATOLOGY, Issue 4 2010You have free access to this content No abstract is available for this article. [source] AJH Hematology Crossword Puzzle, February 2010AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HEMATOLOGY, Issue 2 2010You have free access to this content No abstract is available for this article. [source] Environmental Damage and the Puzzle of the Self-TorturerPHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2006CHRISOULA ANDREOU First page of article [source] Transplant Glomerulopathy: New Clues in the Puzzle of Chronic Allograft Nephropathy?AMERICAN JOURNAL OF TRANSPLANTATION, Issue 9 2003Claudio Ponticelli No abstract is available for this article. [source] A Nanoscale Jigsaw-Puzzle Approach to Large ,-Conjugated Systems,ANGEWANDTE CHEMIE, Issue 38 2010Dr. Xingfa Gao Ein Puzzlespiel: Ein einfaches Modell für die Stabilität konjugierter Kohlenstoff-Hybridmaterialien wird vorgestellt und rechnerisch verifiziert. Auf dieser Grundlage wird eine einfache ,Puzzle"-Strategie für das Design solcher Hybridmaterialien vorgeschlagen (siehe Bild; C,grün, N,blau, H,weiß). [source] Public Accountability is Always an Unresolved Puzzle for Public ServantsAUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2009Jay N. Shih First page of article [source] FIAs (Foliation Intersection/Inflection Axes) Preserved in Porphyroblasts, the DNA of Deformation: A Solution to the Puzzle of Deformation and Metamorphism in the Colorado, Rocky Mountains, USAACTA GEOLOGICA SINICA (ENGLISH EDITION), Issue 5 2009Afroz Ahmad SHAH Abstract: FIAs have been used extensively for more than a decade to unravel deformation and metamorphic puzzles. Orogenic processes developing early during the history or orogenesis challenge scientists because compositional layering in rocks always reactivates where multiple deformations have occurred, leaving little evidence of the history of foliation development preserved in the matrix. The foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, USA contain a succession of four FIA sets (trends) that would not have been distinguishable if porphyroblasts had not grown during the multiple deformation events that affected these rocks or if they had rotated as these events took place. They reveal that both the partitioning of deformation and the location of isograds changed significantly as the deformation proceeded. [source] LEARNING TO SOLVE PROBLEMS FROM EXERCISESCOMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE, Issue 4 2008Prasad Tadepalli It is a common observation that learning easier skills makes it possible to learn the more difficult skills. This fact is routinely exploited by parents, teachers, textbook writers, and coaches. From driving, to music, to science, there hardly exists a complex skill that is not learned by gradations. Natarajan's model of "learning from exercises" captures this kind of learning of efficient problem solving skills using practice problems or exercises (Natarajan 1989). The exercises are intermediate subproblems that occur in solving the main problems and span all levels of difficulty. The learner iteratively bootstraps what is learned from simpler exercises to generalize techniques for solving more complex exercises. In this paper, we extend Natarajan's framework to the problem reduction setting where problems are solved by reducing them to simpler problems. We theoretically characterize the conditions under which efficient learning from exercises is possible. We demonstrate the generality of our framework with successful implementations in the Eight Puzzle, symbolic integration, and simulated robot planning domains illustrating three different representations of control knowledge, namely, macro-operators, control rules, and decision lists. The results show that the learning rates for the exercises framework are competitive with those for learning from problems solved by the teacher. [source] Parkinson's Disease Society 6th Spring Conference for ResearchersPROGRESS IN NEUROLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY, Issue 6 2009Lynn Bedford The Parkinson's Disease Society's 6th Spring Conference for Researchers was held in London in May, entitled ,Parkinson's Disease:The Pieces of the Puzzle'. Here, Dr Lynn Bedford, Parkinson's Disease Society Senior Research Fellow, reports on some of the highlights of the conference, including the latest genetic research, the importance of pre-motor symptoms and the therapeutic potential of the peptide exendin-4, found in the saliva of a poisonous lizard. Copyright © 2009 Wiley Interface Ltd [source] A Hidden-picture Puzzles GeneratorCOMPUTER GRAPHICS FORUM, Issue 7 2008Jong-Chul Yoon Abstract A hidden-picture puzzle contains objects hidden in a background image, in such a way that each object fits closely into a local region of the background. Our system converts image of the background and objects into line drawing, and then finds places in which to hide transformed versions of the objects using rotation-invariant shape context matching. During the hiding process, each object is subjected to a slight deformation to enhance its similarity to the background. The results were assessed by a panel of puzzle-solvers. [source] DESTINATION EFFECTS: RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY AND TRAJECTORIES OF ADOLESCENT VIOLENCE IN A STRATIFIED METROPOLIS,CRIMINOLOGY, Issue 3 2010PATRICK SHARKEY Two landmark policy interventions to improve the lives of youth through neighborhood mobility,the Gautreaux program in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiments in five cities,have produced conflicting results and have created a puzzle with broad implications: Do residential moves between neighborhoods increase or decrease violence, or both? To address this question, we analyze data from a subsample of adolescents ages 9,12 years from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of children and their families that began in Chicago,the site of the original Gautreaux program and one of the MTO experiments. We propose a dynamic modeling strategy to separate the effects of residential moving across three waves of the study from dimensions of neighborhood change and metropolitan location. The results reveal countervailing effects of mobility on trajectories of violence; whereas neighborhood moves within Chicago lead to an increased risk of violence, moves outside the city reduce violent offending and exposure to violence. The gap in violence between movers within and outside Chicago is explained not only by the racial and economic composition of the destination neighborhoods but also by the quality of school contexts, adolescents' perceived control over their new environment, and fear. These findings highlight the need to simultaneously consider residential mobility, mechanisms of neighborhood change, and the wider geography of structural opportunity. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||