Buy on Bad News

On the Robustness of ‘Good News and Bad News’∗

In situations where noisy signals of some underlying variable are observed, Paul Milgrom (The Bell Journal of Economics, 12(2): 380–391) showed that a higher signal implies a higher posterior (in the sense of first-order stochastic dominance) for every non-degenerate prior if and only if the conditional distribution satisfies the strict monotone likelihood ratio property (MLRP). We show that fo...

hiv/aids good news and bad news

Breaking bad news.

Bad News on Decision Problems for Patterns

We study the inclusion problem for pattern languages, which is shown to be undecidable by Jiang et al. (J. Comput. System Sci. 50, 1995). More precisely, Jiang et al. demonstrate that there is no effective procedure deciding the inclusion for the class of all pattern languages over all alphabets. Most applications of pattern languages, however, consider classes over fixed alphabets, and therefo...

Giving Bad News.

In the practice of oncology, it is difficult not to be impressed by the number of clinical situations that necessitate the conveyance of unfavorable medical information to patients and families. These include the communication of the cancer diagnosis, a poor prognosis, the failure of anticancer treatment, the occurrence of unwanted and significant side effects, the ineligibility for a clinical ...