prior probability

That is the title of this paper (preprint via PsyArXiv) by Alexander Etz, et al. We plan on reading it in the next few days and will report back soon! (Hat tip: Brian D. Earp, via Twitter.)

Image credit: burrsettles

Jeff Desjardins poses the following question in this report: “What has more value: all major publicly traded department stores in the United States, or Amazon?” The answer is Amazon. In the words of Mr Desjardins: “Add together the market caps of Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, JCPenney, Sears, and Macy’s, and they amount to a significant $297.8 billion. However, it’s not enough to beat the Amazon machine. The online retailer alone is worth $356 billion, making it one of the largest companies by market capitalization in the world.”

Also, what a difference ten years make: “Ten years ago, the future of brick and mortar retail sill looked bright. The aforementioned retailers were worth a collective $400 billion, and Amazon was only valued at $17.5 billion.”

Credit: dirkb86

Dirk B. created a scale map of the world out of LEGO bricks. You can read more about his project here and here.

We’ve heard many fancy restaurants are starting to ban children, but did you know that Apple Park, Apple’s massive $5 billion spaceship campus (pictured below) consisting of 2,800,000 square feet, doesn’t have a single childcare facility. More here, via CNET. (Hat tip: Ryan Tate.)

My wife and I took turns driving from Orlando, Florida to Savannah, Georgia via various interstate highways earlier today in order to attend the annual meeting of Academy of Legal Studies in Business (#ALSB): I-4 East to I-95 North to I-16 East. There was light traffic most of the way, and I noticed that most (if not all) motorists, including ourselves, were driving at least 10 to 20 miles per hour in excess of the posted speed limits, depending on whether the speed limit was 60 or 70 mph. In other words, rule evasion, far from being some rare occurrence, is the norm, at least when traffic is light! (By the way, doesn’t my contagion model of rule evasion explain this behavior? If driver A sees driver B speeding (and getting away with it), then A should be more likely to speed himself.) So, how common is rule evasion in other domains of life?

We presented our contagion model of rule evasion in our previous post. Here, however, we shall point out some flaws with our model. To begin with, our model implies that actors are either law-abiding or law-evading, when in reality, actors might adopt a mixed strategy, i.e. complying with probability p and evading with probability 1 – p. Another flaw is that our model does not specifically take into account detection uncertainty or legal uncertainty. In reality, we would expect the levels of such uncertainty to have an effect on the little c and T variables in our model, i.e. on the background rate of compliance and on the transmission rate. In any case, we are not sure why some models distinguish between detection uncertainty and legal uncertainty. So, we need to find a way of incorporating uncertainty in our contagion model, although we would lump both forms of uncertainty together.

Happy birthday Adys Ann!