The paper analyzes unintiutive properties (paradoxes) of the FIFA's ranking of national football teams. The most surprising phenomenon is underrating the teams of the main championship tournament hosts. This "host effect" follows the absence of hosts in preliminaries and the resulting restriction of hosts' pre-tournament matches to friendlies that enter the FIFA system with low weights. Various models built with the FIFA data allow to estimate that the place of the Polish team as a host of Euro 2012 was lowered from 16 to 35 positions.

In the paper, we analyze a modifi cation of the allocation problem. The problem can be formulated as follows: sellers in trading agency have a right to sell goods at price offered by the buyer. To this aim, they observe offers which appear at jump times of a Poisson process which are at the same time the decision moments. A reward of the seller who accepted the offer is equal to the discounted value of the selected offer. The right to accept or reject the presented offer is given only to one of the sellers at the moment of appearance of the offer. Once rejected, offer cannot be considered again nor can it be considered by other sellers. The right to make the decision concerning the acceptance or rejection of a presented offer is assigned in random way, such that the probability of obtaining this right by each of the sellers is equal. The aim is to fi nd the strategy which allows to maximize the sum of expected rewards of the sellers under the condition that each of them should earn the same amount of money on average.

The presented experiments are aimed at determining: (1) whether risk perception and risk acceptance are two distinct psychological processes and (2) how aspirations affect each process. It has been tested whether risk is independent of and preferences are depend on aspirations. In Experiment 1 72 employees of a high-tech company were presented with pairs of risky projects. The aspiration level was defi ned as the target return on the project and was set through an explicit instruction. In Experiment 2 93 bridge players were presented with pairs of contracts – one a sure thing and the other a risky one. The aspiration level was relatedto the team IMP points after the fi rst part of a knockout tournament and was set through an instruction. In both experiments with a between-subject design, two different aspiration levels were set for each group. All respondents were asked to judge riskiness of presented options and to select one. The results indicate that risk perception is insensitive to changes in aspirations, but preferences are. This supports distinctness of risk perception and risk acceptance.