Oliver Munday
People think their own first names are less usual than others do.
Psychology
My Name's Not the Same
So you think you're special? Actually you probably do—and that feeling, shared by others, may be why people think their own first names are less usual than others do.
In a paper, a psychologist reports finding such "false uniqueness effects" when college students were asked to rate how common their first name was on a 100-point scale. Members of a gender-matched control group were asked to provide a similar ranking for the same first names. As a reference, all the students were given a list of names from campus enrollment and an approximate indication of their frequency. This provided a rule of thumb. People rated their own names as significantly less common than others did.
A second study covered in the same paper found that students strongly preferred relatively uncommon first names. That may help explain why the subjects may have been biased toward considering their own names more unusual than others did.
"What's in a Name? Our False Uniqueness," John W. Kulig, British Journal of Social Psychology (October)
Finance
Sharing Is for Chumps
Financial experts argue for a great variety of investment strategies, but these approaches all have one thing in common: Once the word is out about them, their returns shrink.
That's the finding of a couple of finance professors who looked at 82 market strategies—differences in valuations that gave investors a chance to profit and were then described in academic papers. In a working paper, the authors estimate that the average return decays after publication by about 35%.
This seems to happen mostly because investors learn about the strategy from the academic papers and trade on it, thereby diminishing the advantage (in keeping with the way markets are supposed to work). The effect is most pronounced, the professors write, with strategies focusing on stocks with large market capitalization, high-dollar-volume trading and dividends.
"Does Academic Research Destroy Stock Return Predictability?" R. David McLean and Jeffrey Pontiff, Social Science Research Network (October)
Oliver Munday
When pay wasn't explicitly termed negotiable, men were 29% more likely to negotiate than women.
Workplace
Which Sex Bargains More?
Lots of research suggests that men are more likely than women to negotiate their starting salary. Now a real-world study finds that the description of the job determines which sex is more likely to speak up.
In contrast to prior studies, this one advertised actual jobs. Researchers placed help-wanted ads for administrative assistants in nine American cities and got responses from roughly 2,400 job-seekers. When pay wasn't explicitly termed negotiable, men were 29% more likely to negotiate than women. But when pay was explicitly negotiable, women were 9% more likely to negotiate.
Negotiating starting pay is important, the authors report. Earlier research has found that workers who fail to negotiate starting salaries lose more than $500,000 in income by age 60.
"Do Women Avoid Salary Negotiations? Evidence From a Large Scale Natural Field Experiment," Andreas Leibbrandt and John A. List, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 18511 (November)
Getty Images
What if a heart regulator got its power from the beat of the heart it controls?
Energy in a Heartbeat
What if a heart regulator got its power from the beat of the heart it controls?
Implanted pacemakers keep the human heart beating reliably, but they have to be replaced every five to seven years when the battery runs out. Now a team of researchers has shown how heartbeats themselves could provide the power.
The researchers, led by aerospace engineer M. Amin Karami at the University of Michigan, created an energy harvester made of materials that can produce electricity by expanding and contracting as the result of vibrations from a beating heart. Even at rates as low as 20 beats per minute, the device generated ample power in a lab to keep a pacemaker going. If successful, the research could lead to smaller devices that run indefinitely inside the body.