Luigi Piper

Quantity Distortion Effect in Consumers’ Perception of Different Volumes and Weights of Money A Pilot Study

Consumers tend to misunderstand the physical value of cash money by adopting improper anchors for their judgments (e.g., banknote size and shape, currency denominations, etc.). In a pilot study carried out on a sample of 242 participants (n = 116 men; M age = 29.6 year, SD = 10.8), a quantity distortion effect was demonstrated by evaluating consumers’ misperceptions of different monetary quantities, either in terms of volume or weight, using banknotes of the same denomination (€50). A threshold value was found, for both volume (€876,324) and weight (€371,779), above (below) which consumers tend to overrate (underrate) monetary amounts. The theoretical and operative implications are discussed.

Modeling an artificial pancreas using retarded impulsive differential equation

The glucose-insulin regulatory system is characterized by a dynamic that includes some delays in the processes acting inside. This aspect is basically a key issue for people using open-loop or closed-loop artificial pancreas. This paper will focus on the influence that the above delays have in the latest mathematical models, and in particular on those resulting from the delivering of insulin at the subcutaneous level. Such models analyze the fluctuations in the concentration of intravenous glucose and insulin in a system regulated by an open loop or a closed loop (Artificial Pancreas). The paper introduces new features in terms of mathematical aspects to solve the problem of the actual delivering of glucose by using Retarded Differential Equations and Impulsive Differential Equations (in cases of micro-infusion), that analytically describe these dynamics.