Browsing by Subject "Expertise"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Open Access
Currency forecasting: an investigation of extrapolative judgement
(Elsevier, 1997) Wilkie-Thomson, M. E.; Önkal-Atay, D.; Pollock, A. C.
This paper aims to explore the potential effects of trend type, noise and forecast horizon on experts' and novices' probabilistic forecasts. The subjects made forecasts over six time horizons from simulated monthly currency series based on a random walk, with zero, constant and stochastic drift, at two noise levels. The difference between the Mean Absolute Probability Score of each participant and an AR(1) model was used to evaluate performance. The results showed that the experts performed better than the novices, although worse than the model except in the case of zero drift series. No clear expertise effects occurred over horizons, albeit subjects' performance relative to the model improved as the horizon increased. Possible explanations are offered and some suggestions for future research are outlined.
Open Access
Evaluating predictive performance of judgemental extrapolations from simulated currency series
(Elsevier, 1999) Pollock, A. C.; Macaulay, A.; Önkal-Atay, D.; Wilkie-Thomson, M. E.
Judgemental forecasting of exchange rates is critical for financial decision-making. Detailed investigations of the potential effects of time-series characteristics on judgemental currency forecasts demand the use of simulated series where the form of the signal and probability distribution of noise are known. The accuracy measures Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Squared Error (MSE) are frequently applied quantities in assessing judgemental predictive performance on actual exchange rate data. This paper illustrates that, in applying these measures to simulated series with Normally distributed noise, it may be desirable to use their expected values after standardising the noise variance. A method of calculating the expected values for the MAE and MSE is set out, and an application to financial experts' judgemental currency forecasts is presented.
Open Access
The influence of trend strength on directional probabilistic currency predictions
(Elsevier, 2003) Thomson, M. E.; Önkal-Atay, D.; Pollock, A. C.; Macaulay, A.
An experiment is reported which compares the judgmental forecasting performance of experts and novices using simulated currency series with differing trend strengths. Analyses of directional probability forecasts reveal: (1) significant effects of trend strength on all aspects of predictive performance being studied, with evidence for the hard-easy effect where overconfidence is exhibited on weak (i.e., more difficult) trends, while underconfidence is shown on strong (i.e., less difficult) trends; (2) lower performance of experts on relative accuracy and profitability measures, reflecting experts' resistance to strong trends; (3) better overall performance on negative trends; and (4) superior performance of composite forecasts. Possible explanations are offered for these results and future research directions are outlined.
Open Access
The political economy of Kulturkampf: evidence from imperial Prussia and republican Turkey
(Springer New York LLC, 2018) Grigoriadis, Ioannis N.; Grigoriadis, T. N.
This paper analyzes the political incentives of Kulturkampf and the implementation of secularization in imperial Prussia and republican Turkey. A game-theoretic model defining Kulturkampf as a static game between priests and the executive is proposed. The willingness of priests to accept the government’s offer and be transformed into bureaucratic experts varies. Individualist priests are easier to recruit as they care more about their personal welfare than social distribution by the church, whereas the reverse holds for collectivist priests. Nevertheless, the long-run success of the Kulturkampf depends on the effective recruitment of collectivist priests and their entry into formal politics in favor of the executive.
Open Access
Professionalism
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
Ideals of professionalism, like those of work more generally, have often been articulated in conjunction with notions of manliness, at least since what are commonly called “the professions” (law, medicine, and the ministry) emerged in the mid–eighteenth century. Large numbers of American men have often rooted their masculine identities in specialized training, technical expertise, and professional credentials. While the impersonal and bureaucratic codes that govern conduct and advancement in the professions constitute a departure from earlier definitions of masculinity grounded in autonomy and manual labor, the characteristics associated with professional endeavors—social indifference; intellectual power; adherence to abstract, impersonal rules; mastery of expert knowledge; an emphasis on rational behavior and thought; and a premium on advancement and achievement— have been gendered as masculine in American culture.
Open Access
Task difficulty and expertise mediate the effects of roving on perceptual performance
(2019-01) Ceylan, Gizay
Experience-dependent improvement of perception, known as perceptual learning, is possible in the absence of feedback, but feedback enables faster progress as demonstrated by both unsupervised and supervised learning mechanisms. Perceptual learning models have shown that mixing these two learning mechanisms may potentially cause synaptic drift and disruption of learning. Models predict this disruption in simultaneously learning two tasks with differing difficulty levels, but not for tasks of equal difficulty. The roving, randomly intermingling of two different tasks, has thus sometimes been found to disrupt learning, but not always. Interestingly, the deleterious effect of roving may occur not only during learning but also even after a task has been learned. In this study, we examine roving's effects based on task difficulty as a function of expertise level. Subjects were trained with a vertical line bisection task, where they were asked to decide if the central line was offset to the left or right outer lines. Following training, the trained stimulus was roved with a narrower untrained bisection stimulus; half of the subjects were exposed to the roved stimuli, which were equated for difficulty using an adaptive staircase method, while other half were exposed to stimuli made to differ in difficulty levels using different staircase procedures for each. We demonstrated that performances improved with training. Moreover, roving deteriorated performance for the trained task under mixed difficulty conditions but not under matched difficulty conditions. Training participants over multiple days further revealed that roving's deleterious effects decreased with increasing expertise levels.