In this note we investigate the infringement (entry) decision for a firm facing an incumbent patent holder with uncertain patent rights. The entrant risks a dispute by entering, resulting in either a settlement (licensing) or litigation and trial. Using the litigation model described by Priest and Klein, we investigate the expected dispute resolution and its impacts on the entrant’s pre-dispute...

Extreme overvalued beliefs (EOB) are rigidly held, non-deusional beliefs that are the motive behind most acts of terrorism and mass shootings. EOBs are differentiated from delusions and obsessions. The concept of an overvalued idea was first described by Wernicke and later applied to terrorism by McHugh. Our group of forensic psychiatrists (Rahman, Resnick, Harry) refined the definition as an a...

Extending prior research on belief attributions, we investigated the extent to which 5- to 8-year-olds and adults distinguish their beliefs and other humans' beliefs from God's beliefs. In Study 1, children reported that all agents held the same beliefs, whereas adults drew greater distinctions among agents. For example, adults reported that God was less likely than humans to view behaviors as ...

A decision maker is asked to quantify her beliefs over a state space by a probability vector. We focus on the relationship between her data base and her beliefs. We show that, if beliefs given a union of two databases are a convex combination of beliefs given each of the databases, the belief formation process follows a simple formula: beliefs are normalized similarity-weighted aggregation of t...

This paper introduces a formal method to aggregate over basic beliefs, in order to deduce aggregated or complex beliefs as often used in applications. Complex beliefs can represent several things, such as a belief about a period in which other beliefs held or the minimal or maximal certainty with which a belief held. As such they contain richer information than the basic beliefs they are aggreg...

Beliefs about relative skill matter for risky decisions such as career choices, market entry, and financial investments. Yet in most laboratory experiments risk is exogenously given and beliefs about relative skill play no role. We use a laboratory experiment free of strategy confounds to isolate the impact of beliefs about relative skill on risky choices. We find that low (high) skill individu...

This study aimed to investigate the relationships among practicing teachers’ epistemic beliefs, pedagogical beliefs and their beliefs about the use of ICT through survey methodology. Participants were 396 high school practicing teachers from mainland China. The path analysis results analyzed via structural equation modelling technique indicated that the systemic relationships among these three ...