We investigate whether superstitious beliefs held directly by only a fraction of the population affect market equilibrium. Using data from multiracial Singapore, we find that apartments whose unit numbers end with 8, an auspicious number for Chinese, are sold at 0.9% premium, whereas those that end with 4, an inauspicious number for Chinese, are sold at 1.5% discount. The discount for inauspici...

Some issues concerning beliefs of agents are discussed. These issues are the general syntactic form of beliefs, the logic underlying beliefs, acquiring beliefs, and reasoning with beliefs. The logical setting is more expressive and aspects of the reasoning and acquisition processes are more general than are usually considered.

Traditional decision theory has assumed that agents have complete, consistent, and readily available beliefs and preferences. Obviously, even if an expert system has complete and consistent beliefs, it cannot have them readily available. Moreover, some beliefs about beliefs are not even approximately computable. It is shown that if all players have complete and consistent beliefs, they can comp...

My theory is a version of foundationalism. Foundationalism says that there are certain beliefs, the so-called "foundational beliefs," which we are justified in holding and which do not depend on any other beliefs for their justification. Perceptual beliefs, in my view, are foundational. Notice that the definition of foundational beliefs does not say that they do not depend on anything else for ...

BACKGROUND Patients' causal beliefs about their mental disorders are important for treatment because they affect illness-related behaviours. However, there are few studies exploring patients' causal beliefs about their mental disorder. OBJECTIVES (a) To qualitatively explore patients' causal beliefs of their mental disorder, (b) to explore frequencies of patients stating causal beliefs, and (...

UNLABELLED Although research has shown that patients' beliefs about their pain are related to pain adjustment and treatment outcomes, little is known about the beliefs of their significant others. The purpose of this study was to develop a measure of pain beliefs in significant others and to examine the correlates of these beliefs. Participants were 104 married couples in which 1 partner report...

Previous work shows that children view group membership and psychological traits in essentialist terms, perceiving them to be both biologically determined and stable across time. To what extent might individuals view mental states such as beliefs similarly? Given that beliefs are often based on experience and can change across time, one hypothesis is that beliefs on the whole do not elicit esse...