REFLECTIONS ON PSI: GOOD NEWS AND BAD

hiv/aids good news and bad news

The Good News and the Bad News

There is much that is attractive about Michael Burawoy’s examination of the critical turn to a public sociology. I find plausible his account of the academic nature of 1970s radical sociology especially that mobilized notions such as Althusser’s “theoretical practice.” I also was cheered to read the account of the positive developments currently in train in the USA and especially with how socia...

Consistent Good News and Inconsistent Bad News

Good news is more persuasive when it is more consistent, and bad news is less damaging when it is less consistent. We show when Bayesian updating supports this intuition so that a biased sender prefers more or less variance in the news depending on whether the mean of the news exceeds expectations, and we apply the result to selective news distortion by a manager of multiple projects. If news f...

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...

Good and bad news for an antiangiogenic.