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How to quickly and easily improve your blackjack game.
u probably play too conservatively. This is the reason why 80% of blackjack mistakes are made, even among high-stakes gamblers: This paper uses proprietary data from a blackjack table in Las Vegas to analyze how the expectation of regret affects peoples’ decisions during gambles. Even among a group of people who choose to participate in a risk-taking activity, we find strong evidence of an economically significant omission bias: 80% of the mistakes at the table are caused by playing too…
1 min read
Does an attractive face mean an attractive body?
th guys it can: We investigated whether men’s faces contain embedded cues that signal differences in individual fitness. Data on shoulder-to-hip ratios (SHR), grip strength, sexual history, and facial photographs were collected from male college students. Female college students rated the photographs for attractiveness We found a striking relationship between ratings of facial attractiveness and body morphology. Males with attractive faces had significantly more masculine, wedge-shaped SHRs. Ratings of facial attractiveness accounted for over 25% of the variance in this…
1 min read
Persistence, crazy Hollywood stars and why the least productive may end up running the show:
show that in competitive careers based on individual performance the least productive individuals may have the highest probabilities to be promoted to top positions. These individuals have the lowest fall-back positions and, hence, the highest incentives to succeed in career contests. This detrimental incentive effect exists irrespective of whether effort and talent are substitutes or complements in the underlying contest-success function. However, in case of complements the incentive effect may be be outweighed by a productivity effect that favors…
2 minutes
Drink too much? Smoke too much? Wanna clean up your act? Have a daughter, not a son.
ttle is known about why some human beings make risky life-choices. This paper provides evidence that people's health decisions and addictive actions are influenced by the gender of their children. Having a daughter leads individuals -- in micro data from Great Britain and the United States -- to reduce their smoking, drinking, and drug-taking. The paper's results are consistent with the hypothesis that human beings "self-medicate‟ when under stress. Source: "The Effects of Daughters on Health Choices and Risk Behaviour"…
2 minutes
What’s the deal with discrimination?
ve no illusions, discrimination is still alive and well. I've posted before on racism in the US. And a recent study on discrimination in the job market is particularly appalling: Decades of racial progress have led some researchers and policymakers to doubt that discrimination remains an important cause of economic inequality. To study contemporary discrimination we conducted a field experiment in the low-wage labor market of New York City. The experiment recruited white, black, and Latino job applicants, called testers,…
7 minutes
Does movie violence increase violent crime?
pe. In fact, violent movies significantly reduce crime: Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field. We exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM,…
2 minutes
Did all that drinking you did in college really hurt your grades?
ah, it did. Especially if you were smart: This paper examines the effect of alcohol consumption on student achievement by exploiting the discontinuity in drinking at age 21 at a college in which the minimum legal drinking age is strictly enforced. We find that drinking causes significant reductions in academic performance, particularly for the highest-performing students. This suggests that the negative consequences of alcohol consumption extend beyond the narrow segment of the population at risk of more severe, low-frequency, outcomes.…
1 min read
What’s the right level of trust?
wish I knew the answer because this study says it's extremely important to get it right: A vast literature has investigated the relationship between trust and aggregate economic performance. We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs available in the European Social Survey. We show that heterogeneity of trust beliefs in the population, coupled with the tendency of individuals to extrapolate…
2 minutes
