Impure placebo is a useless concept

Impure placebo is a useless concept.

Placebos are allegedly used widely in general practice. Surveys reporting high level usage, however, have combined two categories, 'pure' and 'impure' placebos. The wide use of placebos is explained by the high level usage of impure placebos. In contrast, the prevalence of the use of pure placebos has been low. Traditional pure placebos are clinically ineffective treatments, whereas impure plac...

Parity is Positively Useless

We give the first examples of non-trivially positively-useless predicates subject only to P 6= NP. In particular, for every constraint function Q : {−1, 1}4 → R, we construct Contraint-SatisfactionProblem (CSP) instances without negations which have value at least 1 − ε when evaluted for the arity-four odd-parity predicate, yet it is NP-hard to find a solution with value significantly better th...

Impure altruism and impure selfishness

Altruism refers to a willingness to benefit others, even at one’s own expense. In contrast, selfishness refers to prioritizing one’s own interests with no consideration for others. However, even if an agent is selfish, he might nevertheless act as if he were altruistic out of selfish concerns triggered when his action is observed; that is, he might seek to feel pride in acting altruistically an...

...Rationality and SEA... Effective tiering – useful concept or useless chimera?

Impure Altruism and Impure Selfishness: Online Appendix

We provide an extention of GU model that incorporates a decision maker who is averse to inequality of allocations among other agents. We also provide a detaled discussion on the experiments on dictator games with an exit option.