Centocor takes the bad news with the good

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...

hiv/aids good news and bad news

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...

Competition in the health system: good news and bad news.

Competition among health plans, hospitals, and physicians has taken place in fifteen health care markets primarily on the basis of price and secondarily on network breadth and style of care. In most markets, competition resulted in lower (or slowly growing) premium prices. Within a type of plan product, competition was leading to similar prices and networks and was reducing product differentiat...

Good News or Bad News? Let the Market Decide

News stories about publicly traded companies are labeled positive or negative according to price changes of the company stock. It is shown that models based on lexical features can distinguish good news from bad news with accuracy of about 70%. Unfortunately, this works only when stories are labeled according to cotemporaneous price changes but does not work when they are labeled according to s...