1,526 research outputs found
Joint-search theory: new opportunities and new frictions
Search theory routinely assumes that decisions about the acceptance/rejection of job offers (and, hence, about labor market movements between jobs or across employment states) are made by individuals acting in isolation. In reality, the vast majority of workers are somewhat tied to their partners - in couples and families - and decisions are made jointly. This paper studies, from a theoretical viewpoint, the joint job-search and location problem of a household formed by a couple (e.g., husband and wife) who perfectly pools income. The objective of the exercise, very much in the spirit of standard search theory, is to characterize the reservation wage behavior of the couple and compare it to the single-agent search model in order to understand the ramifications of partnerships for individual labor market outcomes and wage dynamics. We focus on two main cases. First, when couples are risk averse and pool income, joint search yields new opportunities - similar to on-the-job search - relative to the single-agent search. Second, when the two spouses in a couple face job offers from multiple locations and a cost of living apart, joint search features new frictions and can lead to significantly worse outcomes than single-agent search.Search theory ; Unemployment ; Wages
User Satisfaction in Competitive Sponsored Search
We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study
the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers
compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to
display in response to user queries. Customers, in turn, have private
preferences over search results and will tend to use search engines that are
more likely to display pages satisfying their demands.
Our main question is whether competition between search engines increases the
overall welfare of the users (i.e., the likelihood that a user finds a page of
interest). When search engines derive utility only from customers to whom they
show relevant results, we show that they differentiate their results, and every
equilibrium of the resulting game achieves at least half of the welfare that
could be obtained by a social planner. This bound also applies whenever the
likelihood of selecting a given engine is a convex function of the probability
that a user's demand will be satisfied, which includes natural Markovian models
of user behavior.
On the other hand, when search engines derive utility from all customers
(independent of search result relevance) and the customer demand functions are
not convex, there are instances in which the (unique) equilibrium involves no
differentiation between engines and a high degree of randomness in search
results. This can degrade social welfare by a factor of the square root of N
relative to the social optimum, where N is the number of webpages. These bad
equilibria persist even when search engines can extract only small (but
non-zero) expected revenue from dissatisfied users, and much higher revenue
from satisfied ones
Decision makers best choice: a comparative investigation into the efficiency of search strategies based on ranks
Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operation
Thesaurus-assisted search term selection and query expansion: a review of user-centred studies
This paper provides a review of the literature related to the application of domain-specific thesauri in the search and retrieval process. Focusing on studies which adopt a user-centred approach, the review presents a survey of the methodologies and results from empirical studies undertaken on the use of thesauri as sources of term selection for query formulation and expansion during the search process. It summaries the ways in which domain-specific thesauri from different disciplines have been used by various types of users and how these tools aid users in the selection of search terms. The review consists of two main sections covering, firstly studies on thesaurus-aided search term selection and secondly those dealing with query expansion using thesauri. Both sections are illustrated with case studies that have adopted a user-centred approach
Exact Real Search: Formalised Optimisation and Regression in Constructive Univalent Mathematics
The real numbers are important in both mathematics and computation theory.
Computationally, real numbers can be represented in several ways; most commonly
using inexact floating-point data-types, but also using exact
arbitrary-precision data-types which satisfy the expected mathematical
properties of the reals. This thesis is concerned with formalising properties
of certain types for exact real arithmetic, as well as utilising them
computationally for the purposes of search, optimisation and regression.
We develop, in a constructive and univalent type-theoretic foundation of
mathematics, a formalised framework for performing search, optimisation and
regression on a wide class of types. This framework utilises Mart\'in
Escard\'o's prior work on searchable types, along with a convenient version of
ultrametric spaces -- which we call closeness spaces -- in order to
consistently search certain infinite types using the functional programming
language and proof assistant Agda.
We formally define and prove the convergence properties of type-theoretic
variants of global optimisation and parametric regression, problems related to
search from the literature of analysis. As we work in a constructive setting,
these convergence theorems yield computational algorithms for correct
optimisation and regression on the types of our framework.
Importantly, we can instantiate our framework on data-types from the
literature of exact real arithmetic, allowing us to perform our variants of
search, optimisation and regression on ternary signed-digit encodings of the
real numbers, as well as a simplified version of Hans-J. Boehm's functional
encodings of real numbers. Furthermore, we contribute to the extensive work on
ternary signed-digits by formally verifying the definition of certain exact
real arithmetic operations using the Escard\'o-Simpson interval object
specification of compact intervals.Comment: A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy. 198 pages. Supervised by Dan Ghica and Mart\'in
Escard\'
Joint-Search Theory: New Opportunities and New Frictions
Search theory routinely assumes that decisions about the acceptance/rejection of job offers (and, hence, about labor market movements between jobs or across employment states) are made by individuals acting in isolation. In reality, the vast majority of workers are somewhat tied to their partners--in couples and families--and decisions are made jointly. This paper studies, from a theoretical viewpoint, the joint job-search and location problem of a household formed by a couple (e.g., husband and wife) who perfectly pools income. The objective of the exercise, very much in the spirit of standard search theory, is to characterize the reservation wage behavior of the couple and compare it to the single-agent search model in order to understand the ramifications of partnerships for individual labor market outcomes and wage dynamics. We focus on two main cases. First, when couples are risk averse and pool income, joint search yields new opportunities--similar to on-the-job search--relative to the single-agent search. Second, when the two spouses in a couple face job offers from multiple locations and a cost of living apart, joint-search features new frictions and can lead to significantly worse outcomes than single-agent search.
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