In this paper, I study the e¤ects of overcon…dence on incentive contracts in a moral-hazard framework in which principal and agent knowingly hold asymmetric beliefs regarding the probability of success of their enterprise. Agent overcon…dence can have con‡icting e¤ects on the equilibrium contract. On the one hand, an overcon…dent agent disproportionately values successcontingent payments, and t...

The recent global financial crisis may have lessons for ecologists. One driver of the problems many countries faced toward the end of the previous decade was risky speculation by larger banks (Okamoto, 2009). In cases where such investments succeed, the bank is the winner. When such investments fail they have the potential to ruin the bank. However, the largest banks are often deemed to be so i...

Would you go to the dentist more often if it were free? Observational data is here used to analyze the impact of full-coverage insurance on dental care utilization using di¤erent identi…cation strategies. The challenge of assessing the bite of moral hazard without an experimental study design is to separate it from adverse selection, as agents act on private and generally unobservable informati...

We propose a class of transformation hazard models for rightcensored failure time data. It includes the proportional hazards model (Cox) and the additive hazards model (Lin and Ying) as special cases. Due to the requirement of a nonnegative hazard function, multidimensional parameter constraints must be imposed in the model formulation. In the Bayesian paradigm, the nonlinear parameter constrai...

This thesis describes an approach to designing hazard avoidance alerting systems based on a Markov decision process (MDP) model of the alerting process, and shows its benefits over standard design methods. One benefit of the MDP method is that it accounts for future decision opportunities when choosing whether or not to alert, or in determining resolution guidance. Another benefit is that it pr...

Increasing vehicle popularity and, in the meantime, traffic accidents, is one of the most important death factors these days. Many policies have been implemented to decrease accident injuries and damages, and to increase safety. Between three effective factors in accidents, including human, vehicle, and road, human factor is known as the most important one. Human behavior during driving is deri...

Probabilistic seismic hazard analysis is a technique for estimating the annual rate of exceedance of a specified ground motion at a site due to the known and suspected earthquake sources. A Monte-Carlo approach is utilized to estimate the seismic hazard at a site. This method uses numerous resampling of an earthquake catalog to construct synthetic catalogs to evaluate the ground motion hazard a...

Patterson and Ahroon’s analysis of the AHAAH model [(2005) USAARL Rept. No. 2005-01] was evaluated. In their analysis they repeatedly failed to apply the model in a manner consistent with its premises and the theory supporting it. Thus the model was not truly tested on its own grounds; but was faulted because it did not conform to their expectations of how the ear would have responded had it be...

In survival analysis or reliability and maintenance studies, hazard-rate function plays an important role, since it describes the instantaneous failure probability given that the individual survived or the item has not failed up to that instance. Sudden changes in the hazard function may occur due to overhauls, treatment effects or maintenance activities. A problem of statistical interest is th...