Maximin 31

Hormesis is a widely observed phenomenon in many branches of life sciences, ranging from toxicology studies to agronomy, with obvious public health and risk assessment implications. We address optimal experimental design strategies for determining the presence of hormesis in a controlled environment using the recently proposed Hunt-Bowman model. We propose alternative models that have an implicit hormetic threshold, discuss their advantages over current models, and construct and study properties of optimal designs for (i) estimating model parameters, (ii) estimating the threshold dose, and (iii) testing for the presence of hormesis. We also determine maximin optimal designs that maximize the minimum of the design efficiencies when we have multiple design criteria or there is model uncertainty where we have a few plausible models of interest. We apply these optimal design strategies to a teratology study and show that the proposed designs outperform the implemented design by a wide margin for many situations.

Humans dislike unequal allocations. Although often conflated, such 'inequality-averse' preferences are separable into two elements: egalitarian concern about the variance and maximin concern about the poorest (maximizing the minimum). Recent research has shown that the maximin concern operates more robustly in allocation decisions than the egalitarian concern. However, the real-time cognitive dynamics of allocation decisions are still unknown. Here, we examined participants' choice behaviour with high temporal resolution using a mouse-tracking technique. Participants made a series of allocation choices for others between two options: a 'non-Utilitarian option' with both smaller variance and higher minimum pay-off (but a smaller total) compared with the other 'Utilitarian option'. Choice data confirmed that participants had strong inequality-averse preferences, and when choosing non-utilitarian allocations, participants' mouse movements prior to choices were more strongly determined by the minimum elements of the non-Utilitarian options than the variance elements. Furthermore, a time-series analysis revealed that this dominance emerged at a very early stage of decision making (around 500 ms after the stimulus onset), suggesting that the maximin concern operated as a strong cognitive anchor almost instantaneously. Our results provide the first temporally fine-scale evidence that people weigh the maximin concern over the egalitarian concern in distributive judgements.

The complex regional pain syndrome type 1 from the surgeon's point of view: description of the symptoms, imaging (nuclear medicine, MRI) and of the associated psychological context. Importance of the need for a multi-disciplinary organization from the diagnostic to the therapeutic care.