Related papers: Everything's Fine
A natural experiment is a type of observational study in which treatment assignment, though not randomized by the investigator, is plausibly close to random. A process that assigns treatments in a highly nonrandom, inequitable manner may,…
Alternating recurrent events, where subjects experience two potentially correlated event types over time, are common in healthcare, social, and behavioral studies. Often there is a primary event of interest that, when triggered, initiates a…
We investigate the fluctuations induced by irrationality in simple games with a large number of competing players. We show that Nash equilibria in such games are ``weakly'' stable: irrationality propagates and amplifies through players'…
The dynamics of economies and infectious disease are inexorably linked: economic well-being influences health (sanitation, nutrition, treatment capacity, etc.) and health influences economic well-being (labor productivity lost to sickness…
We consider optimal stopping problems, in which a sequence of independent random variables is drawn from a known continuous density. The objective of such problems is to find a procedure which maximizes the expected reward; this is often…
Financial instability has become a significant issue in today's society. While research typically focuses on financial aspects, there is a tendency to overlook time-related aspects of unstable work schedules. The inability to rely on…
Social ties are strongly related to well-being. But what characterizes this relationship? This study investigates social mechanisms explaining how social ties affect well-being through social integration and social influence, and how…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
Popular multiverse models such as the one based on the string theory landscape require an underlying set of unexplained laws containing many specific features and highly restrictive prerequisites. I explore the consequences of relaxing some…
This paper solves the problem of optimal dynamic consumption, investment, and healthcare spending with isoelastic utility, when natural mortality grows exponentially to reflect Gompertz' law and investment opportunities are constant.…
The physical idea of the natural origin of diseases and deaths has been presented. The fundamental microscopical reason is the destruction of any metastable state by thermal activation of a nucleus of a nonreversable change. On the basis of…
Have you ever wondered why we have never heard of psychics and palm readers winning millions of dollars in state or local lotteries or becoming Wall Street wolfs? Neither have I. Yet we are constantly bombarded by tabloid news on how…
In this work, we consider ranking problems among a finite set of candidates: for instance, selecting the top-$k$ items among a larger list of candidates or obtaining the full ranking of all items in the set. These problems are often…
Is an option especially tempting when it is both immediate and certain? I test the effect of risk on the present-bias factor given quasi-hyperbolic discounting. In my experiment workers allocate about thirty to fifty minutes of real-effort…
It is a well-known empirical phenomenon that natural axiomatic theories are pre-well-ordered by consistency strength. Without a precise mathematical definition of "natural," it is unclear how to study this phenomenon mathematically. We will…
Buckling instabilities driven by tissue growth underpin key developmental events such as the folding of the brain. Tissue growth is disordered due to cell-to-cell variability, but the effects of this variability on buckling are unknown.…
An epidemic spreading in a network calls for a decision on the part of the network members: They should decide whether to protect themselves or not. Their decision depends on the trade-off between their perceived risk of being infected and…
Standard approaches to the theory of financial markets are based on equilibrium and efficiency. Here we develop an alternative based on concepts and methods developed by biologists, in which the wealth invested in a financial strategy is…
Environmental fluctuations have important consequences in the organization of ecological communities, and understanding how such a variability influences the biodiversity of an ecosystem is a major question in ecology. In this paper, we…
When animals are transported and pass through customs, some of them may have dangerous infectious diseases. Typically, due to the cost of testing, not all animals are tested: a reasonable selection must be made. How to test effectively…