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Background: Whether and how the uncertainty about a public health crisis should be communicated to the general public have been important and yet unanswered questions arising over the past few years. As the most threatening contemporary public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has renewed interest in these unresolved issues by both academic scholars and public health practitioners., Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of communicating uncertainty about COVID-19-related threats and solutions on individuals' risk perceptions and misinformation vulnerability, as well as the sequential impact of these effects on health information processing and preventative behavioral intentions., Methods: A 2×2 (threat uncertainty [presence vs absence]×solution uncertainty [presence vs absence]) full-fractional between-subjects online experiment was conducted with 371 Chinese adults. Focusing on the discussion of whether the asymptomatic cases detected during the COVID-19 pandemic would further lead to an uncontrolled pandemic, news articles were manipulated in terms of whether the infectiousness of asymptomatic cases and the means to control the transmission are presented in terms of their certainty or uncertainty. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions, being instructed to read one news article. After reading the news article assigned, participants were asked to respond to a series of questions to assess their cognitive and behavioral responses., Results: Individuals were more susceptible to believing false COVID-19-related information when a certain threat and uncertain solution were framed in the news article. Moreover, individuals' perceptions of crisis severity increased when exposed to news information containing uncertain solutions. Both misinformation vulnerability and perceived severity were positively associated with information processing. Information seeking was positively associated with protective behavioral intention, whereas information avoidance was negatively associated with protective behavioral intention., Conclusions: Our findings imply that uncertainty, depending on its aspect, can be effectively communicated to the public during an emerging public health crisis. These results have theoretical and practical implications for health communicators and journalists. Given its limited influence on individuals' cognitive and behavioral responses, uncertainty related to a health threat should be disseminated to meet the public's expectation of information transparency. However, caution is advised when communicating uncertainty related to potential solutions, as this factor exhibited a mixed impact on individual responses during a crisis., (©Rui Zhao, Xuerong Lu, Jiayi Yang, Biao Li. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 14.05.2024.)

Background: Individuals' stress in responding to the current COVID-19 pandemic may be exacerbated by information uncertainty driven by inconsistent, unverified, and conflicting news from various sources. The current study aims to test if information uncertainty during the COVID-19 outbreak was related to acute stress disorder (ASD) over and above other psychosocial stressors.Methods: An anonymous online survey was conducted with 7800 college students throughout China from January 31 through February 11, 2020. Existing scales were modified to measure ASD and six potential stressors including information uncertainty during the COVID-19 outbreak. Hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to assess the unique association of information uncertainty with ASD. To minimize the effect of large sample size and also to get a sense of whether the effects of information uncertainty were similar to people at the center of the epidemic, we repeated the hierarchical regression among 10% of the students who were randomly selected from the entire sample ("10% random sample"; n = 780) and 226 students from Hubei Province where the outbreak started.Results: Information uncertainty was highly prevalent among the respondents (64%). It was significantly associated with ASD beyond other key variables and potential stressors across three samples. In the hierarchical regression among the entire sample, demographic variables accounted for 9.4% of the variance in ASD. The other five stressors added 5.1% of the variance. The information uncertainty (β = .159; p < .001) explained an additional 2.1% of the variance. Likewise, the information uncertainty explained an additional 2.1 and 3.4% of the variance in ASD beyond all other variables among the 10% random sample (β = .165; p < .001) and the Hubei sample (β = .196; p < .01), respectively.Conclusion: Information uncertainty is a unique correlate of psychological stress during the COVID-19 outbreak. Reducing information uncertainty is essential not only for halting virus transmission but also for mitigating negative impacts of the pandemic on people's psychosocial wellbeing. Transparent, timely, and accurate communication can reduce public confusion, fear, and stress. Capacity building in governments, communities, and media outlets to prevent, reduce and manage information uncertainty should be a critical part of the response to an emerging global health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically investigates how firm-level information uncertainty impacts momentum profits in the Chinese Class A share market. We employ seven different factors to gauge the degree of firm-level information uncertainty—firm size, firm age, analysts’ coverage, return volatility, dispersion in analysts’ earnings forecast, trading volume, and the quality/strength of corporate governance (free float ratio). We find evidence showing that information uncertainty has an amplifying effect over the momentum profits, and the amplifying effect is more pronounced over the time periods following DOWN market state over the sample period from January 1996 to December 2013. The robustness of the empirical evidence is warranted by a risk-adjustment test based on the FF3F model and Wang and Xu’s (Financ Anal J 60(6):65-77, 2004) FF3F model, a sub-period analysis, and a different definition of market states. The empirical findings can provide an important reference point for international and domestic investors when adjusting investment strategies and portfolio positions in relatively volatile financial markets such as the Chinese stock market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate that arbitrage risk, constructed using three measures — noise trader risk, trading cost and information uncertainty — can predict the return of stocks cross-sectionally in China. The findings are broadly consistent even when out-of-sample tests are conducted using the Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regression approach. We also construct hypothetical portfolios using the information arising from arbitrage risk and find the existence of abnormal returns which is robust to the use of various portfolios constructed by re-sampling the observations through multiple approaches (e.g., by market capitalization and by book-to-market ratio). Lastly, we reconstruct our portfolios by considering the unique nature of the Chinese stock market (e.g., the dominance of individual investors). Our trading strategies again successfully obtain abnormal returns, suggesting that arbitrage risk can be useful to construct effective investment portfolios in China. • In- and out-of-sample tests are conducted on the cross-sectional stock return in China. • Arbitrage risk is decomposed into noise trader risk, trading cost and information uncertainty. • These risk components effectively forecast stock returns. • These risk components can be used to construct portfolios with abnormal returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]