Moving away from home always lead most university students to feel homesick that negatively impacts their academic performance and excessive acculturative stress can contribute to eating and sleeping problems, low energy and headaches. Severe homesickness is classified as an adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood that in some critical cases leads to suicide. To consider this ...

The decisions voters make-and whether those decisions are rational-have profound implications on the functionality of a democratic society. In this study, we delineated two criteria in evaluating voter rationality and weigh evidence of voter rationality versus irrationality. Furthermore, we compared models in two different elections in Taiwan to explore the reasons behind the irrational choices...

Previous studies have shown right parietal activation in response to observing irrational actions. Behavioral studies show that people sometimes imitate irrational actions, a phenomenon called overimitation. However, limitations on movement in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) mean that the neural basis of overimitation has not been studied. To address this, our study employed a less...

Microloan markets allow individual borrowers to raise funding from multiple individual lenders. We use a unique panel dataset which tracks the funding dynamics of borrower listings on Prosper.com, the largest microloan market in the United States. We find evidence of rational herding among lenders. Well-funded borrower listings tend to attract more funding after we control for unobserved listin...

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is the problem of decomposing a given nonnegative n × m matrix M into a product of a nonnegative n×d matrix W and a nonnegative d×m matrix H. NMF has a wide variety of applications, including bioinformatics, chemometrics, communication complexity, machine learning, polyhedral combinatorics, among many others. A longstanding open question, posed by Cohen an...

Testing market effi ciency in betting markets does not necessarily get around the joint hypothesis problem because the result depends on the assumed role of bookmakers. In a simple model of monopolistic competition, bookmakers’ rational pricing induces the Favorite-Longshot Bias even without bettors’irrationality (Rational Mispricing) and accommodates bettors’irrational beliefs to exploit betti...

In 2 studies, the authors examined college students’ awareness of irrational judgments on gambling tasks. Participants could express a preference between 2 gambles with equivalent ratios (1:10 vs. 10:100) for Study 1 or no preference for Study 2. Participants also rated their certainty that each response option (i.e., 1:10, 10:100, no preference) was rational (analytically based processing) or ...