The Vaccine and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee meets at least once a year to decide the composition of the influenza vaccine in the U.S. Past evidence suggests that the Committee could use a more systematic approach to incorporate observed information and to quantify the risks associated with different options. There are two key tradeoffs involved in this decision. One, if the Com...

Standard models of choice assume that the weight given to information from different sources depends exclusively on its diagnosticity. In this paper we study whether the same piece of information is weighted more heavily simply because it was directly experienced rather than merely observed. We investigate this possibility by conducting repeated game experiments in which groups of players are r...

On the basis of the half-Cauchy distribution, we propose the called beta-half-Cauchy distribution for modeling lifetime data. Various explicit expressions for its moments, generating and quantile functions, mean deviations, and density function of the order statistics and their moments are provided. The parameters of the new model are estimated by maximum likelihood, and the observed informatio...

We investigate to what extent genuine social preferences can explain observed other-regarding behavior. In a social dilemma situation (a dictator game variant), subjects can choose whether to learn about the consequences of their choice for the receiver. We find that a majority of subjects showing other-regarding behavior when the payoffs of the receiver are known choose to ignore them if possi...

Standard economic models assume that the weight given to information from different sources depends exclusively on its diagnosticity. In this paper we study whether the same piece of information is weighted more heavily simply because it arose from direct experience rather than from observation. We investigate this possibility by conducting repeated game experiments in which groups of players a...

The total number of new tuberculosis (TB) cases notified in Singapore among citizens, permanent residents and foreigners rose by 46% from 2004 to 2010. During this period, the proportion of foreigners increased from 29% to 47% of the total case burden. In 2008, the TB incidence rate among Singapore citizens and permanent residents increased for the first time in ten years, despite the on-going ...