The traditional premise of criminal law is that criminals who are convicted of similar crimes under similar circumstances ought to be subject to identical sentences. This article provides an efficiency-based rationale for discriminatory sentencing, i.e., establishes circumstances under which...

We consider the classical problem of selecting the best of two treatments in clinical trials with binary response. The target is to find the design that maximizes the power of the relevant test. Many papers use a normal approximation to the power function and claim that Neyman allocation that...

Recent research in psychology, especially that called "The New Unconscious", is discovering strange and unintuitive phenomena, some of which raise interesting challenges for the law. This paper discusses some of these challenges. For example, if much of our mental life occurs out of our...

Based on a model introduced by Kaminsky, Luks, and Nelson (1984), we consider a zero-sum allocation game called the Gladiator Game, where two teams of gladiators engage in a sequence of one-to-one fights in which the probability of winning is a function of the gladiators' strengths. Each team's...

Efficient foragers avoid returning to food sources that they had previously depleted. Bombus terrestris bumblebees use a counting-like strategy to leave Alcea setosa flowers just after visiting all of their five nectaries. We tested whether a similar strategy is employed by solitary Eucera sp....

The term “social preference” refers to decision makers’ satisfaction with their own outcomes and those attained by comparable others. The present research was inspired by what appears to be a discrepancy in the literature on social preferences – specifically, between a class of studies...

We provide an axiomatic characterization of the measure of riskiness of gambles (risky assets) introduced by Foster and Hart (2009). The axioms are based on the concept of “wealth requirement”.

We find a herding tendency among both amateur and professional investors and conclude that the propensity to herd is lower in the professionals. These results are obtained both when we consider herding into individual stocks and herding into stocks in general. Herding depends on the firm’s...

The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion are of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people’s reactions to change....

Gambling frequencies on single numbers in real casino roulette were displayed in a contour map. This resulted not only in a confirmation that gamblers are subject to middle bias, but also to accessibility effects. The figure allowed us to infer the location of the roulette wheel and croupier...