Gnawing doubts

Gnawing at the bone

he major apoptotic effector protein caspase-3 holds the power to destroy a huge number of proteins in a cell—over 34 thousand human proteins with a caspase-3 cleavage motif have T been sequenced. Nevertheless, apoptosis proceeds in an ordered fashion; only specific substrates are cleaved at the proper time. On page 1051, Lee et al. describe a new function of the apoptosis regulator DEDD as a sc...

Reductionist Doubts

According to reductionism, every complex phenomenon can and should be explained in terms of the simplest possible entities and mechanisms. The parts determine the whole. This approach has been an outstanding success in science, but this essay will point out ways in which it could nevertheless be giving us wrong ideas and holding back progress. For example, it may be impossible to understand key...

Doubts , Asymmetries , and Insurance ∗

This paper studies an insurance problem where agents doubt their forecasting models. Using Hansen-Sargent multiplier preferences, these doubts are represented as sets of probability distributions that are statistically hard to discriminate. Agents differ endogenously in two aspects their forecasting models and the extent of doubts surrounding these models. This heterogeneity gives rise to a new...

Doubts or variability?

Reinterpreting most of the market price of risk as a price of model uncertainty eradicates a link between asset prices and measures of the welfare costs of aggregate fluctuations that was proposed by Hansen et al. (1999), Tallarini (2000), and Alvarez and Jermann (2004). Prices of model uncertainty contain information about the benefits of removing model uncertainty, not the consumption fluctua...

Doubts about dementia diagnoses.