In Chinese culture, certain digits are lucky and others unlucky. We test how such numerological superstition affects financial decision in the China IPO market. We find that the frequency of lucky numerical stock listing codes exceeds what would be expected by chance. Also consistent with superstition effects, newly listed firms with lucky listing codes experience inferior post-IPO abnormal ret...

Current epistemological orthodoxy has it that knowledge is incompatible with luck. More precisely: Knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck (of a certain, interesting kind). This is often treated as a truism which is not even in need of argumentative support. In this paper, I argue that there is lucky knowledge. In the first part, I use an intuitive and not very developed notion of luck to...

not supposed to be scientists. When I asked my high school guidance counselor for permission to take a second year of algebra, she sneered, “What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?” The college environment was similar. If the dean of women could not dissuade a girl from majoring in science or engineering, she had nothing more to do with her. My first bit of encouragement came in my t...

People have a greater desire to date highly attractive partners, which induces intrasexual competition between same-sex individuals. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore whether and how intrasexual competition modulates pain empathy for a same-sex rival and the underlying neural mechanism. Participants were scanned while processing the pain of a same-sex 'luck...

PURPOSE To describe lucky adolescents who unintentionally avoid pregnancy. DESIGN AND METHODS The second phase of a descriptive qualitative study in which 17 low-income African-American females ages 19 to 26 participated in open-ended interviews on how they avoided pregnancy as adolescents. RESULTS Constant comparative analysis revealed that five of the girls avoided pregnancy because they ...

We investigate whether overconfidence is affected by superstitious beliefs and whether the effect is heterogeneous according to gender. With this aim, we run a field experiment involving about 700 Italian students. According to widespread superstitions, some numbers are considered lucky while others are thought of as unlucky. In our experiment, we exploited this by randomly assigning students t...