Related papers: When intuition fails in assessing conditional risk…
The friendship paradox -- the observation that, on average, one's friends have more friends than oneself -- admits two common formulations depending on whether averaging is performed over edges or over nodes. These two definitions, the…
Decisions taken in our everyday lives are based on a wide variety of information so it is generally very difficult to assess what are the strategies that guide us. Stock market therefore provides a rich environment to study how people take…
Recently, we introduced in arXiv:1105.2434 a model for product adoption in social networks with multiple products, where the agents, influenced by their neighbours, can adopt one out of several alternatives. We identify and analyze here…
We conduct an incentivized experiment on a nationally representative US sample \\ (N=708) to test whether people prefer to avoid ambiguity even when it means choosing dominated options. In contrast to the literature, we find that 55\% of…
We study a repeated information design problem faced by an informed sender who tries to influence the behavior of a self-interested receiver. We consider settings where the receiver faces a sequential decision making (SDM) problem. At each…
In this paper, we provide theoretical and empirical estimates for the likelihood of a negative participation paradox under instant runoff voting in three-candidate elections. We determine the probability of the paradox and related…
Moores Paradox is a test case for any formal theory of belief. In Knowledge and Belief, Hintikka developed a multimodal logic for statements that express sentences containing the epistemic notions of knowledge and belief. His account…
Riddles are concise linguistic puzzles that describe an object or idea through indirect, figurative, or playful clues. They are a longstanding form of creative expression, requiring the solver to interpret hints, recognize patterns, and…
The Parrondo's paradox is a counterintuitive phenomenon where individually-losing strategies can be combined in producing a winning expectation. In this paper, the issues surrounding the Parrondo's paradox are investigated. The focus is…
When a student is asked to perform a given task, her subjective estimate of the difficulty of that task has a strong influence on her performance. There exists a rich literature on the impact of perceived task difficulty on performance and…
Motivated by certain applications from physics, biochemistry, economics, and computer science, in which the objects under investigation are not accessible because of various limitations, we propose a trial-and-error model to examine…
Riddle-solving requires advanced reasoning skills, pushing LLMs to engage in abstract thinking and creative problem-solving, often revealing limitations in their cognitive abilities. In this paper, we examine the riddle-solving capabilities…
The remaining travel time of a plane shortens with every minute that passes from its departure, and a flame diminishes a candle with every second it burns. Such everyday occurrences bias us to think that processes which have already begun…
Given two sources of evidence about a latent variable, one can combine the information from both by multiplying the likelihoods of each piece of evidence. However, when one or both of the observation models are misspecified, the…
Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…
The frog model starts with one active particle at the root of a graph and some number of dormant particles at all nonroot vertices. Active particles follow independent random paths, waking all inactive particles they encounter. We prove…
We study an ensemble of individuals playing the two games of the so-called Parrondo paradox. In our study, players are allowed to choose the game to be played by the whole ensemble in each turn. The choice cannot conform to the preferences…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
We consider an observational learning model with exogenous public payoff shock. We show that confounded learning doesn't arise for almost all private signals and almost all shocks, even if players have sufficiently divergent preferences.
Bertrand's paradox is a famous problem of probability theory, pointing to a possible inconsistency in Laplace's principle of insufficient reason. In this article we show that Bertrand's paradox contains two different problems: an "easy"…