The sophistication of financial decisions varies with age: middle-aged adults borrow at lower interest rates and pay fewer fees compared to both younger and older adults. We document this pattern in ten financial markets. The measured effects can not be explained by observed risk characteristics. The sophistication of financial choices peaks at about age 53 in our cross-sectional data. Our resu...

The decade since the Reserve Bank of Australia’s 1996 Conference on ‘The Future of the Financial System’ has been a period of remarkable strength for banking systems in advanced industrial countries, particularly Australia. Banking institutions have enjoyed strong growth in business volumes, high asset quality and record profi tability and they have proven their resilience in the face of episod...

As Dr. Joel Lexchin makes painfully obvious in this issue (see pages 351 to 356), regulatory processes governing pharmaceutical advertising in Canada and elsewhere are seriously compromised. However, the remedial measures Lexchin proposes are not sufficient. Financial sanctions against improper advertising are likely to be regarded by manufacturers as the cost of doing business, and any regulat...

Modern sports/media complex may be the result of complex inactions of communication technologies, social developments, and the increased sophistication of businesses in understanding the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of consumer behavior. From the promotion options of print media, television and radio, to the self-engaging aspects of Internet sport coverage and gaming, the spectator is rapidl...

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) to other people in order to understand and predict their behaviour. If others are rewarded to compete or cooperate with you, then what they will do depends upon what they believe about you. This is the reason why social interaction induces recursive ToM, of the sort "I think that you think that I think, e...

We examine whether the ‘Level-k’ model of strategic behavior generates reliable cross-game testable predictions at the level of the individual player. Subjects’ observed levels are fairly consistent within one family of similar games, but within another family of games there is virtually no cross-game correlation. Moreover, the relative ranking of subjects’ levels is not consistent within the s...

Objective: Little activity has occurred in nursing home (information technology) IT adoption. The purpose of this study was to describe the range of IT sophistication for resident management processes and explore the association of IT sophistication with nursing home ownership, bedsize, and regional status. Methods: This descriptive, exploratory, cross-sectional study used an IT sophistication ...

We present a game-theoretic model of political discourse that explores how strategic incentives to make potentially persuasive arguments vary across different informational contexts. We show that political sophistication of the listeners fundamentally affects the speakers’ incentives to make informative arguments, increasing the informed speech for speakers who are less likely to be successful ...

Since the 1950s, antifungal drug discovery has identified three classes of natural products (griseofulvin, polyenes and echinocandins) and four classes of synthetic chemicals (allylamines, azoles, flucytosine and phenylmorpholines) with clinical value against fungal infections. For life threatening fungal disease, the polyene amphotericin B is still a common choice despite toxic side-effects. T...

OBJECTIVE There is growing recognition that a more sophisticated information technology (IT) infrastructure is needed to improve the quality of nursing home care in the United States. The purpose of this study was to explore the concept of IT sophistication in nursing homes considering the level of technological diversity, maturity and level of integration in resident care, clinical support, an...