The quotient of random variables with normal distributions is examined and proven to have have power law decay, with density f(x)~f_0 x^(-2), with the coefficient depending on the means and variances of the numerator and denominator, and their correlation. We also obtain the conditional...

Anticipated reward magnitude and probability comprise dual components of expected value (EV), a cornerstone of economic and psychological theory. However, the neural mechanisms that compute EV have not been characterized. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined...

Detecting heterogeneity within a population is crucial in many economic and financial applications. Econometrically, this requires a credible determination of multimodality in a given data distribution. We propose a straightforward yet effective technique for mode inference in discrete data...

The data on JIFs provided by Thomson Scientific can only be considered as a sample since they do not cover the entire universe of those documents that cite an intellectual output (paper, article, etc) or are cited by others. Then, questions arise if the empirical distribution (best fit to the...

A compound Poisson distribution is a sum of independent and identically distributed random variables over a count variable that follows a Poisson distribution. Generally, its distribution is not tractable. However, it has many practical applications that require the estimation of the quantile...

This paper considers sampling proportional to expected size from a partly unknown distribution. The applied context is the exploration for undiscovered resources, like oil accumulations in different deposits, where the most promising deposits are likely to be drilled first, based on some...

In this paper we provide a review of copula theory with applications to finance. We illustrate the idea on the bivariate framework and discuss the simple, elliptical and Archimedean classes of copulae. Since the copulae model the dependency structure between random variables, next we explain the...

A new measure of asymmetry in dependence is proposed which is based on taking the difference between the margin-free coskewness parameters of the underlying copula. The new measure and a related test are applied to both a hydrological and a financial market data sample and we show that both...

If you put two mounds of sugar with identical conditions near an ants' nest, which one will the ants congregate at? Kirman explained the process of ant social herding using a simple model, and he conducted an interesting simulation. The fat tail distribution in the security market is well known,...

This paper considers the problem of point prediction based on a predictive distribution, representing the uncertainty about the outcome. The issue explored is the reporting of a single characteristic, typically the mean, the median or the mode, in the context of a skewed distribution and...