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In economy, markets are denoted as efficient when it is impossible to systematically generate profits which outperform the average. In the past years, the concept has been tested in other domains such as the growing sports betting market.…
A flourishing empirical literature investigates the prevalence of $p$-hacking based on the distribution of $p$-values across studies. Interpreting results in this literature requires a careful understanding of the power of methods for…
We study the theoretical consequence of p-hacking on the accumulation of knowledge under the framework of mis-specified Bayesian learning. A sequence of researchers, in turn, choose projects that generate noisy information in a field. In…
Publication bias and p-hacking are two well-known phenomena that strongly affect the scientific literature and cause severe problems in meta-analyses. Due to these phenomena, the assumptions of meta-analyses are seriously violated and the…
We propose an operational measure of information leakage in a non-stochastic setting to formalize privacy against a brute-force guessing adversary. We use uncertain variables, non-probabilistic counterparts of random variables, to construct…
Data analysis in HEP experiments often uses binned likelihood from data and finite Monte Carlo sample. Statistical uncertainty of Monte Carlo sample has been introduced in Frequentist Inference in some literatures, but they are not suitable…
A pervasive issue in statistical hypothesis testing is that the reported $p$-values are biased downward by data "peeking" -- the practice of reporting only progressively extreme values of the test statistic as more data samples are…
As adoption of mobile phones has skyrocketed, so have scams involving them. The text method is called SMiShing, (aka SMShing, or smishing) in which a fraudster sends a phishing link via Short Message Service (SMS) text to a phone. However,…
Humans are sensitive to suspicious coincidences when generalizing inductively over data, as they make assumptions as to how the data was sampled. This results in smaller, more specific hypotheses being favored over more general ones. For…
Machine learning models are increasingly used for software security tasks. These models are commonly trained and evaluated on large Internet-derived datasets, which often contain duplicated or highly similar samples. When such samples are…
A (possibly illegal) game of chance, which is described in Chapter 14 of Marc Elsberg's thriller "GREED", seems to offer an excellent chance of winning. However, as the gambling starts and evolves over several rounds, the actual experience…
We theoretically analyze the problem of testing for $p$-hacking based on distributions of $p$-values across multiple studies. We provide general results for when such distributions have testable restrictions (are non-increasing) under the…
We look at the Florida Lottery records of winners of prizes worth $600 or more. Some individuals claimed large numbers of prizes. Were they lucky, or up to something? We distinguish the "plausibly lucky" from the "implausibly lucky" by…
Statistical hypothesis testing serves as statistical evidence for scientific innovation. However, if the reported results are intentionally biased, hypothesis testing no longer controls the rate of false discovery. In particular, we study…
We present a framework for analyzing the near miss effect in lotteries. A decision maker (DM) facing a lottery, falsely interprets losing outcomes that are close to winning ones, as a sign that success is within reach. As a result of this…
Passwords are widely used for user authentication and, despite their weaknesses, will likely remain in use in the foreseeable future. Human-generated passwords typically have a rich structure, which makes them susceptible to guessing…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
Despite its importance, relatively little attention has been devoted to studying the effects of exposing individuals to digital choice interfaces. In two pre-registered lottery-choice experiments, we administer three information-search…
P-hacking is prevalent in reality but absent from classical hypothesis testing theory. As a consequence, significant results are much more common than they are supposed to be when the null hypothesis is in fact true. In this paper, we build…
We present the expected values from p-value hacking as a choice of the minimum p-value among $m$ independents tests, which can be considerably lower than the "true" p-value, even with a single trial, owing to the extreme skewness of the…