The economic concept of the second-best involves the idea that multiple simultaneous deviations from a hypothetical first-best optimum may be optimal once the first-best itself can no longer be achieved, since one distortion may partially compensate for another. Within an evolutionary framework, we apply this concept to behavior under risk. We argue that the two main components of prospect theo...

This paper uses disclosed mutual fund portfolio holdings to develop stock selection models. Our models aggregate portfolio holdings across mutual funds, weighted by their past performance, to predict future stock returns – an overweighting by successful managers, or an underweighting by unsuccessful managers is considered to be a signal that a stock is currently underpriced. We find that invest...

The processing of sequentially presented numerical information is a prerequisite for decisions from experience, where people learn about potential outcomes and their associated probabilities then make choices between gambles. Little known, however, how people's preference choosing gamble affected by they perceive process information. To address this, we conducted series experiments wherein part...

Substitution rates at the three codon positions (r1, r2, and r3) of mammalian mitochondrial genes are in the order of r3 > r1 > r2, and the rate heterogeneity at the three positions, as measured by the shape parameter of the gamma distribution (alpha 1, alpha 2, and alpha 3), is in the order of alpha 3 > alpha 1 > alpha 2. The causes for the rate heterogeneity at the three codon positions remai...

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is a key modeling procedure when analyzing biological sequences. Homology and evolutionary modeling are the most common applications of MSAs. Both are known to be sensitive to the underlying MSA accuracy. In this work, we show how this problem can be partly overcome using the transitive consistency score (TCS), an extended version of the T-Coffee scoring scheme...

When people have access to information sources such as newspaper weather forecasts, drug-package inserts, and mutual-fund brochures, all of which provide convenient descriptions of risky prospects, they can make decisions from description. When people must decide whether to back up their computer's hard drive, cross a busy street, or go out on a date, however, they typically do not have any sum...

Supervised term weighting could improve the performance of text categorization. A way proven to be effective is to give more weight to terms with more imbalanced distributions across categories. This paper shows that supervised term weighting should not just assign large weights to imbalanced terms, but should also control the trade-off between over-weighting and under-weighting. Overweighting,...

We perceive a stable environment despite the fact that visual information is essentially acquired in a sequence of snapshots separated by saccadic eye movements. The resolution of these snapshots varies-high in the fovea and lower in the periphery-and thus the formation of a stable percept presumably relies on the fusion of information acquired at different resolutions. To test if, and to what ...

Loss aversion, the standard model for understanding the effect of losses, is often interpreted to suggest that losses result in more extreme feelings, and this leads to overweighting losses in behavioral decisions. In three experiments, we question this interpretation by examining rated feelings in experience-based and description-based decisions. Experiments 1 and 2 focused on experience-based...

I study the use and overuse of private signals of fundamental value in a common type of experimental asset market. I also assess the impact of two kinds of psychological overcon…dence miscalibration, and the "better than average e¤ect" on the use of private signals, and on market outcomes. Traders use their private signals to make buying and selling decisions. Private signals also a¤ect traders...