Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is a highly prevalent chronic liver disease. Here, we have investigated whether BAR502, a non-bile acid, steroidal dual ligand for FXR and GPBAR1, reverses steato-hepatitis in mice fed a high fat diet (HFD) and fructose. After 9 week, mice on HFD gained ≈30% of b.w (P < 0.01 versus naïve) and were insulin resistant. These overweighting and insulin resistant ...

The investment decisions of small-scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can limit investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in which farmers were randomly assigned to receive cash grants, grants of or opportunities to purchase r...

Collaboration can provide benefits to the individual and the group across a variety of contexts. Even in simple perceptual tasks, the aggregation of individuals' personal information can enable enhanced group decision-making. However, in certain circumstances such collaboration can worsen performance, or even expose an individual to exploitation in economic tasks, and therefore a balance needs ...

The Allais Paradox is a well-known bias in which people’s preferences result in contradictory choices between two normatively identical gamble pairs. Studies have shown that these preference reversals depend on how information is described and presented. In an experiment, we investigate the Allais gambles in several formats including an experiential paradigm, where participants make selections ...

Learning includes the ability to generalize to new situations and respond to similar, yet not identical stimuli. We use stimulus generalization in humans to show that tones that were negatively reinforced induce wider generalization curves than tones that were positively reinforced, and these in turn induce wider curves than neutral memory. Importantly, these wider generalization curves persist...

A widely observed phenomenon in decision making under risk is the apparent overweighting of unlikely events and the underweighting of nearly certain events. This violates standard assumptions in expected utility theory, which requires that expected utility be linear (objective) in probabilities. Models such as prospect theory have relaxed this assumption and introduced the notion of a "probabil...

The investment decisions of small‐scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can reduce investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in which farmers were randomly assigned to receive cash grants, grants of or opportunities to purchase ...

Minimal model analysis of glucose and insulin concentrations in the intravenous glucose tolerance test (IVGTT) has been widely used to obtain a measure of insulin sensitivity in humans. Issues of model validity and IVGTT protocol have been explored extensively. Less attention has been paid, however, to the computer programming protocol for estimating the model parameters (programming implementa...

Emotional experience has a pervasive impact on choice behavior, yet the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Introducing facial-expression primes into a probabilistic learning task, we investigated how affective arousal regulates reward-related choice based on behavioral, model fitting, and feedback-related negativity (FRN) data. Sixty-six paid subjects were randomly assigned to the Neutral-Ne...