Failure is embarrassing. In gambles involving both skill and chance, we show that a strategic desire to avoid appearing unskilled generates behavioral anomalies consistent with prospect theory’s concepts of loss aversion, framing effects, and probability weighting. Based on models from the career concerns literature that formalize early social psychology models of risk taking, the results show ...

Historically, industrialization has been associated with falling relative returns to skills. This fact is at odds with most theories of industrialization, which tend to imply rising skill premia as natural concomitants to economic growth. This paper develops a simple model of economic demography to help solve this puzzle. Conjecturing that households wished to maximize both their levels of inco...

Data from two surveys of twins in China are used to contribute to an improved understanding of the role of economic development in affecting gender differences in the trends in, levels of, and returns to schooling observed in China and in many developing countries in recent decades. In particular, we explore the hypothesis that these phenomena reflect differences in comparative advantage with r...

AIM To determine the cost effectiveness of increasing nurse staffing or changing the nursing skill mix in adult medical and/or surgical patients? BACKGROUND Research has demonstrated that nurse staffing levels and skill mix are associated with patient outcomes in acute care settings. If increased nurse staffing levels or richer skill mix can be shown to be cost-effective hospitals may be more...

Prosthodontics represents a highly developed body of knowledge and skill that spans multiple disciplines. Numerous studies can be cited that address biologic, mechanical, or materials science factors that influence decisions about patient care. On a daily basis as clinicians, teachers, or patients, we experience an interplay of social, economic, and psychologic conditions that similarly influen...

We introduce skill chaining, a skill discovery method for reinforcement learning agents in continuous domains. Skill chaining produces chains of skills leading to an end-of-task reward. We demonstrate experimentally that skill chaining is able to create appropriate skills in a challenging continuous domain and that doing so results in performance gains.

Current concerns over reforming engineering education have focused attention on helping students develop skills and an adaptive expertise. Phenomenological guidelines for instruction along these lines can be understood as arising out of an emerging theory of thinking and learning built on results in the neural, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. We outline this framework and consider some of i...

We examined the controlling factors that allow a prompted skill to become autonomous in a discrete-trials implementation of Touchette's (1971) progressively delayed prompting procedure, but our subjects were rats rather than children with disabilities. Our prompted skill was a left-right lever-press sequence guided by two panel lights. We manipulated (a) the effectiveness of the guiding lights ...