In the practice of oncology, it is difficult not to be impressed by the number of clinical situations that necessitate the conveyance of unfavorable medical information to patients and families. These include the communication of the cancer diagnosis, a poor prognosis, the failure of anticancer treatment, the occurrence of unwanted and significant side effects, the ineligibility for a clinical ...

Doctors shopping for medical malpractice insurance—when there's a choice available—face the classic good news/bad news scenario. The good news is that rates have started to plateau or even drop, so that physicians in the hardest hit parts of the country are seeing some relief. The bad news is that rates are still so high that too many doctors will continue to do what they have been doing—shop m...

The disclosure of bad news is one of the most difficult tasks of a physician. This study explores how physicians prefer to disclose bad news to patients with acute coronary disease in emergency centres in Iran, and to their families.

There is much that is attractive about Michael Burawoy’s examination of the critical turn to a public sociology. I find plausible his account of the academic nature of 1970s radical sociology especially that mobilized notions such as Althusser’s “theoretical practice.” I also was cheered to read the account of the positive developments currently in train in the USA and especially with how socia...

Using a representative agent model in which the investor is averse to ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) and sees an ambiguous piece of news about the fundamental value of a risky asset, I show a number of predictions for the dynamics of stocks around news: Stocks respond more strongly to bad news than to good news, respond positively to neutral news, and increase on average through news. In tim...

The bad news principle states that only the expected severity of future bad news matters for the decision whether to invest today, good news should not matter at all. This paper tests this prediction using firm level expectation data.  2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.

Awaiting uncertain news is stressful, but is it more stressful than receiving bad news? We compared these emotional experiences in two studies. Participants in Study 1 reflected on a personal experience awaiting news that ultimately turned out badly, and participants in Study 2 were law graduates awaiting their results on the bar exam who ultimately failed the exam. In Study 1, participants wer...

Even the most skilled physician knows that conveying bad news to a patient or family can be one of the most arduous aspects of health care. Historically, breaking bad news is a skill that has generally been under-emphasized in training programmes. Critical care physicians are commonly faced with the difficult task of breaking bad news, often in dramatic, emotional and unexpected situations. Bre...

Good news is more persuasive when it is more consistent, and bad news is less damaging when it is less consistent. We show when Bayesian updating supports this intuition so that a biased sender prefers more or less variance in the news depending on whether the mean of the news exceeds expectations, and we apply the result to selective news distortion by a manager of multiple projects. If news f...