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Orbital Frontal Cortex Projections to Secondary Motor Cortex Mediate Exploitation of Learned Rules.
Animals face the dilemma between exploiting known opportunities and exploring new ones, a decision-making process supported by cortical circuits. While different types of learning may bias exploration, the circumstances and the degree to which bias occurs is unclear. We used an instrumental lever press task in mice to examine whether learned rules generalize to exploratory situations and the cortical circuits involved. We first trained mice to press one lever for food and subsequently assessed how that learning influenced pressing of a second novel lever. Using outcome devaluation procedures we found that novel lever exploration was not dependent on the food value associated with the trained lever. Further, changes in the temporal uncertainty of when a lever press would produce food did not affect exploration. Instead, accrued experience with the instrumental contingency was strongly predictive of test lever pressing with a positive correlation between experience and trained lever exploitation, but not novel lever exploration. Chemogenetic attenuation of orbital frontal cortex (OFC) projection into secondary motor cortex (M2) biased novel lever exploration, suggesting that experience increases OFC-M2 dependent exploitation of learned associations but leaves exploration constant. Our data suggests exploitation and exploration are parallel decision-making systems that do not necessarily compete
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Software tools for stochastic programming: A Stochastic Programming Integrated Environment (SPInE)
SP models combine the paradigm of dynamic linear programming with
modelling of random parameters, providing optimal decisions which hedge
against future uncertainties. Advances in hardware as well as software
techniques and solution methods have made SP a viable optimisation tool.
We identify a growing need for modelling systems which support the creation
and investigation of SP problems. Our SPInE system integrates a number of
components which include a flexible modelling tool (based on stochastic
extensions of the algebraic modelling languages AMPL and MPL), stochastic
solvers, as well as special purpose scenario generators and database tools.
We introduce an asset/liability management model and illustrate how SPInE
can be used to create and process this model as a multistage SP application
The Determinants of the Relationship of Corporate Social Performance and Financial Performance: Conceptual Framework
The objective of this paper is to investigate relationship between CSP and CFP using
contingency perspective derived from the strategic management domain. The investigation
will be done using lens of slack resource and good management theory. This study is
expected to provide a new insight on the link between corporate social performance and
corporate financial performance using contingency perspective as suggested in the strategic
management and accounting literature, an area has not been examined in the prior studies.
The result of this study can resolve the existing conflict in the literatures by developing an
integrated model of the link between CSP and CFP and the notion of corporate performance
which, in strategic management, is highly affected by four factors: business environment,
strategy, organization structure, and control system. The model will explain in what
condition the relationship of CSP and CFP is valid
Keywords:
Corporate social performance, corporate financial performance, slack resource theory, good
management theory, contingency theory, and moderating effect
Utilitarian Collective Choice and Voting
In his seminal Social Choice and Individual Values, Kenneth Arrow stated that his theory applies to voting. Many voting theorists have been convinced that, on account of Arrowâs theorem, all voting methods must be seriously flawed. Arrowâs theory is strictly ordinal, the cardinal aggregation of preferences being explicitly rejected. In this paper I point out that all voting methods are cardinal and therefore outside the reach of Arrowâs result.
Parallel to Arrowâs ordinal approach, there evolved a consistent cardinal theory of collective choice. This theory, most prominently associated with the work of Harsanyi, continued the older utilitarian tradition in a more formal style. The purpose of this paper is to show that various derivations of utilitarian SWFs can also be used to derive utilitarian voting (UV). By this I mean a voting rule that allows the voter to score each alternative in accordance with a given scale. UV-k indicates a scale with k distinct values. The general theory leaves k to be determined on pragmatic grounds. A (1,0) scale gives approval voting. I prefer the scale (1,0,-1) and refer to the resulting voting rule as evaluative voting.
A conclusion of the paper is that the defects of conventional voting methods result not from Arrowâs theorem, but rather from restrictions imposed on votersâ expression of their preferences.
The analysis is extended to strategic voting, utilizing a novel set of assumptions regarding voter behavior
Aging, Equality, and Confucian Selves
Liberal democracy aims to treat all adult citizens as politically equal, at least in ideal cases: Once a citizen is over the age of majority, she is deemed a full-fledged member of the community and in theory has equal standing with all other adult citizens when it comes to making policy and participating in the political realm in general. I consider three questions: (1) Is there any plausible alternative to a standard "all adult citizens have equal political standing" model of democracy that could be drawn from a specifically Confucian valuing of elder members of the community? (2) Insofar as there is a plausible alternative, what might it reveal about differences between how liberalism and Confucianism think of human selves as located in time? (3) What sort of difference would it make if the Confucian valuing of age were implemented via informal social norms, on the one hand, or via explicit institutional mechanisms and procedures, on the other
Pushing the envelope of Optimization Modulo Theories with Linear-Arithmetic Cost Functions
In the last decade we have witnessed an impressive progress in the
expressiveness and efficiency of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solving
techniques. This has brought previously-intractable problems at the reach of
state-of-the-art SMT solvers, in particular in the domain of SW and HW
verification. Many SMT-encodable problems of interest, however, require also
the capability of finding models that are optimal wrt. some cost functions. In
previous work, namely "Optimization Modulo Theory with Linear Rational Cost
Functions -- OMT(LAR U T )", we have leveraged SMT solving to handle the
minimization of cost functions on linear arithmetic over the rationals, by
means of a combination of SMT and LP minimization techniques. In this paper we
push the envelope of our OMT approach along three directions: first, we extend
it to work also with linear arithmetic on the mixed integer/rational domain, by
means of a combination of SMT, LP and ILP minimization techniques; second, we
develop a multi-objective version of OMT, so that to handle many cost functions
simultaneously; third, we develop an incremental version of OMT, so that to
exploit the incrementality of some OMT-encodable problems. An empirical
evaluation performed on OMT-encoded verification problems demonstrates the
usefulness and efficiency of these extensions.Comment: A slightly-shorter version of this paper is published at TACAS 2015
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