UNLABELLED Belief polarization is said to occur when two people respond to the same evidence by updating their beliefs in opposite directions. This response is considered to be "irrational" because it involves contrary updating, a form of belief updating that appears to violate normatively optimal responding, as for example dictated by Bayes' theorem. In light of much evidence that people are c...

This paper investigates the extent to which investors are rational with respect to two well-known empirical properties of analyst consensus forecasts: optimism and autocorrelated revisions. Consistent with previous research, I find that investors are aware of the optimistic bias in analyst forecasts, but do not adjust for it completely. Using Mishkin’s test, I find that the market’s expectation...

In the 1960s, it was taken for granted that modernization eroded religion. 1980s, this consensus challenged by rational choice, supply-side, or market model proposed Rodney Stark and associates. particular, they argued UK hardly less religious then than had been in 1880. Clive Field’s compendium of statistical data allows us to test Stark’s approach religiosity UK. We follow with on Europe USA....

J Bone Joint Surg [Br] 2010;92-B:751-9. A review of the current literature shows that there is a lack of consensus regarding the treatment of spondylolysis and spondylolisthesis in children and adolescents. Most of the views and recommendations provided in various reports are weakly supported by evidence. There is a limited amount of information about the natural history of the condition, makin...

In this paper we analyze a simple Bayesian heuristic for learning from others’posteriors and show its applicability to communication in groups and in social networks. The heuristic corresponds to rational Bayesian updating when individuals have conditionally independent information. When agents suffer from corelation neglect they also use the Heuristic. We show that communication in groups can ...

Gastrointestinal stromal tumors are the most common mesenchymal tumors in gastrointestinal tract. They are often asymptomatic and discovered incidentally during endoscopic or barium studies. About 80% GISTs have a KIT (CD 117 antigen) gene mutation. Most affect exon 11, less commonly exon 9,13 or 17, that results in uncontrolled KIT signaling. This led to effective systemic therapies in the for...