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Does this make sense to you? AI in the insurance industry??
January 26, 2019
Businessinsurance.com reported that “Artificial intelligence and other technologies hold great promise for the insurance industry but are not without issues, such as adoption and security…” The January 17, 2019 article entitled “AI holds promise for insurance industry, but with caveats” is based on a “panel of insurance and technology industry executives speaking at the Insurance Information Institute’s Joint Industry Forum in New York” who opined: There are two areas that...
January 26, 2019
Businessinsurance.com reported that “Artificial intelligence and other technologies hold great promise for the insurance industry but are not without issues, such as adoption and security…” The January 17, 2019 article entitled “AI holds promise for insurance industry, but with caveats” is based on a “panel of insurance and technology industry executives speaking at the Insurance Information Institute’s Joint Industry Forum in New York” who opined: There are two areas that...
Damage Caps and Defensive Medicine: Reexamination with Patient‐Level Data
January 25, 2019
Physicians often claim that they practice “defensive medicine,” including ordering extra imaging and laboratory tests, due to fear of malpractice liability. Caps on noneconomic damages are the principal proposed remedy. Do these caps in fact reduce testing, overall health‐care spending, or both? We study the effects of “third‐wave” damage caps, adopted in the 2000s, on specific areas that are expected to be sensitive to med mal risk: imaging rates, cardiac interventions, and lab and radiology...
January 25, 2019
Physicians often claim that they practice “defensive medicine,” including ordering extra imaging and laboratory tests, due to fear of malpractice liability. Caps on noneconomic damages are the principal proposed remedy. Do these caps in fact reduce testing, overall health‐care spending, or both? We study the effects of “third‐wave” damage caps, adopted in the 2000s, on specific areas that are expected to be sensitive to med mal risk: imaging rates, cardiac interventions, and lab and radiology...
Dispute Resolution Data Update
January 21, 2019
This has been a highly productive year for Dispute Resolution Data. Initiatives included: A growing caseload for the DRD database...
January 21, 2019
This has been a highly productive year for Dispute Resolution Data. Initiatives included: A growing caseload for the DRD database...
Development of a General Legal Confidence Scale: A First Implementation of the Rasch Measurement Model in Empirical Legal Studies
January 20, 2019
Legal capability has long been of evident importance in our understanding of legal problem resolution behavior. Although legal capability remains a contested concept, there is much commonality between specifications. Some aspects are generic, while others—such as legal confidence—are particular to law. Such law‐specific measures as have been developed to date have been developed in an ad‐hoc fashion; with no attempts made to test psychometric properties, using either classical test theory...
January 20, 2019
Legal capability has long been of evident importance in our understanding of legal problem resolution behavior. Although legal capability remains a contested concept, there is much commonality between specifications. Some aspects are generic, while others—such as legal confidence—are particular to law. Such law‐specific measures as have been developed to date have been developed in an ad‐hoc fashion; with no attempts made to test psychometric properties, using either classical test theory...
Chief Justice Robots
January 20, 2019
I have an unusually speculative article -- more futurism than law as such -- coming out in a few months in the Duke Law Journal, called Chief Justice Robots. I'd love to hear what people think. Here are the Introduction and the Conclusion; you can read the full article here: IntroductionHow might artificial intelligence change judging? IBM's Watson can beat the top Jeopardy players in answering English-language factual questions. The Watson Debater project is aimed at creating...
January 20, 2019
I have an unusually speculative article -- more futurism than law as such -- coming out in a few months in the Duke Law Journal, called Chief Justice Robots. I'd love to hear what people think. Here are the Introduction and the Conclusion; you can read the full article here: IntroductionHow might artificial intelligence change judging? IBM's Watson can beat the top Jeopardy players in answering English-language factual questions. The Watson Debater project is aimed at creating...
Lawyers at the Peak of Their Careers: A 30‐Year Longitudinal Study of Job and Life Satisfaction
January 19, 2019
A decade ago, we conducted a 20‐year longitudinal study of career and life satisfaction among the class matriculating...
January 19, 2019
A decade ago, we conducted a 20‐year longitudinal study of career and life satisfaction among the class matriculating...
Incentives, Performance and Choking in Darts
January 13, 2019
This paper examines the effect of incentives on the performance of darts players. We analyze four data sets comprising a total of 123,402 darts matches of professional, amateur, and youth players. The game of darts offers an attractive natural research setting, because performance can be observed at the individual level and without the obscuring effects of risk considerations and the behavior of others. We find that amateur and youth players perform better under moderately higher incentives, but choke...
January 13, 2019
This paper examines the effect of incentives on the performance of darts players. We analyze four data sets comprising a total of 123,402 darts matches of professional, amateur, and youth players. The game of darts offers an attractive natural research setting, because performance can be observed at the individual level and without the obscuring effects of risk considerations and the behavior of others. We find that amateur and youth players perform better under moderately higher incentives, but choke...
CrossFit Versus Gold’s Gym
January 12, 2019
As our data showed (see our official academic article on this, Fell & Geher, 2018, published in the Journal of Evolution and Health), the exercise experiences of these two gyms differed pretty dramatically. People who attended Gold's were much more likely to use the stationary bicycle, stairmaster, and treadmill, for instance, while CrossFitters were more likely to use kettleballs and to engage in intensive interval training (designed as proxies for the kinds of physical activities...
January 12, 2019
As our data showed (see our official academic article on this, Fell & Geher, 2018, published in the Journal of Evolution and Health), the exercise experiences of these two gyms differed pretty dramatically. People who attended Gold's were much more likely to use the stationary bicycle, stairmaster, and treadmill, for instance, while CrossFitters were more likely to use kettleballs and to engage in intensive interval training (designed as proxies for the kinds of physical activities...
Five Marketing Lessons from the Payless Shoe Prank
January 12, 2019
An elaborate advertising prank by discount retailer Payless ShoeSource is raising eyebrows and important questions about the ability of marketers to manipulate consumer behavior. The ruse took place in a mall near Los Angeles, where a select group of social media influencers were invited to a private launch party for new Italian shoe designer Bruno Palessi. But after the fashionistas paid hundreds of dollars for what they though was fancy footwear, they discovered they had been duped. Payless...
January 12, 2019
An elaborate advertising prank by discount retailer Payless ShoeSource is raising eyebrows and important questions about the ability of marketers to manipulate consumer behavior. The ruse took place in a mall near Los Angeles, where a select group of social media influencers were invited to a private launch party for new Italian shoe designer Bruno Palessi. But after the fashionistas paid hundreds of dollars for what they though was fancy footwear, they discovered they had been duped. Payless...
Why Did People Pay $600 For a Pair of $20 Payless Shoes?
January 6, 2019
The Palessi Luxury Brand Launch Party Here’s what happened. The company took over a former Armani store in Santa Monica California for a weekend in late November 2018. It created a luxury ambiance and stocked the store with the same Payless shoes that sell for $20–$40. It invented an upscale fashion designer called Bruno Palessi, branding the store as a “Palessi” store. (It even created an Instagram account and website for the fake brand). For the Palessi store’s grand opening...
January 6, 2019
The Palessi Luxury Brand Launch Party Here’s what happened. The company took over a former Armani store in Santa Monica California for a weekend in late November 2018. It created a luxury ambiance and stocked the store with the same Payless shoes that sell for $20–$40. It invented an upscale fashion designer called Bruno Palessi, branding the store as a “Palessi” store. (It even created an Instagram account and website for the fake brand). For the Palessi store’s grand opening...
