165,009 research outputs found
Understanding Legislator Experiences of Family-Friendly Working Practices in Political Institutions
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy edit version of an article published in Politics and Gender. © 2015, Cambridge University Press
Complementary Lipschitz continuity results for the distribution of intersections or unions of independent random sets in finite discrete spaces
We prove that intersections and unions of independent random sets in finite
spaces achieve a form of Lipschitz continuity. More precisely, given the
distribution of a random set , the function mapping any random set
distribution to the distribution of its intersection (under independence
assumption) with is Lipschitz continuous with unit Lipschitz constant if
the space of random set distributions is endowed with a metric defined as the
norm distance between inclusion functionals also known as commonalities.
Moreover, the function mapping any random set distribution to the distribution
of its union (under independence assumption) with is Lipschitz continuous
with unit Lipschitz constant if the space of random set distributions is
endowed with a metric defined as the norm distance between hitting
functionals also known as plausibilities.
Using the epistemic random set interpretation of belief functions, we also
discuss the ability of these distances to yield conflict measures. All the
proofs in this paper are derived in the framework of Dempster-Shafer belief
functions. Let alone the discussion on conflict measures, it is straightforward
to transcribe the proofs into the general (non necessarily epistemic) random
set terminology
Privatization and local government reform in Germany: A slow train
The paper investigates the recent trends in privatization by local government organizations in Germany. It comes to the conclusion that the privatization policy has been two-directional: on the one hand, municipalities have reduced their economic activities, mainly by different forms of contracting out; on the other hand, they have expanded them into profitable fields. In many cases they have preferred a phantom privatization: government bodies have only been transferred into a private-law establishment. The paper examines the barriers to privatization and provides a strategy to overcome them.
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