Because sports are stylized combat, sports may follow power laws similar to those found for wars, individual clashes, and acts of terrorism. We show this fact for football (soccer) by adjusting power laws that show a close relationship between rank and points won by the clubs participating in...

A recent neurobiology study showed that monkeys systematically prefer risky targets in a visual gambling task. We set a similar experiment with preschool children to assess their attitudes toward risk and found the children, like the monkeys, to be risk seeking. This suggests that adult humans...

We conducted a questionnaire study with student subjects to look for explicit correlations between selected biological characteristics of the subjects and manifestation of the Allais paradox in the pattern of their choices between sets of two pairs of risky prospects. We found that particular...

Price changes of the Chinese yuan/US dollar rate are found to display a Sierpinski triangle in an Iterative Function System clumpiness test. This fractal structure commonly emerges in “the chaos game”, where randomness coexists with deterministic rules. We show that a threshold model with...

We find evidence of weak informational efficiency in the Brazilian daily foreign exchange market using Hurst exponents (Hurst 1951, 1955, Feder 1988), which offer an alternative (from statistical physics) to traditional econometric gauges. We show that a trend toward efficiency has been reverted...

Previously we have put forward that the sluggish convergence of truncated Lévy flights to a Gaussian (Phys. Rev. Lett. 73 (1994) 2946) together with the scaling power laws in their probability of return to the origin (Nature 376 (1995) 46) can be explained by autocorrelation in data (Physica A...

Applying a standard questionnaire (Lichtenstein and Fischhoff 1977) to a sample of 44 professional investors, we sought for explicit correlations between selected biological characteristics of the investors and the cognitive bias known as overconfidence. We found that both male and female...

Based on long range dependence, some analysts claim that the exchange rate time series of the pound sterling and of an artificially extended euro have been locked together for years despite daily changes [1, 9]. They conclude that pound and euro are in practice the same currency. We assess the...

The scaling of the probability distribution of the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange index is shown to be described by a Levy stable stochastic process for the modal region of the distribution. Data refer to daily records for the 30-year period 1968-1998. The truncated Levy process is characterized by a...