Random Dictatorship Domains

Published in Games and Economic Behavior https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2014.03.017</p

Is a Liberal Justice, Totalitarian?

In Social Choice Theory, Pareto-Unanimity is an important rule which is applied to compensation tests and therefore in justice. But, deductive logics show that Pareto- Unanimity implies dictatorship and therefore, Pareto-Unanimity is contradictory with non dictatorship. In the case of compensation, citizens are free and accountable for their own behaviour; the Pareto-unanimity implies perfect information on benefactors. Liberty implies dictatorship and then Pareto-Unanimity. compensation exigencies lead to a totalitarian society, as forwarded by the novel of George Orwell (1984).Dictatorship, Pareto-Unanimity, Compensation, Responsibility, Private Information

Democracy versus dictatorship in self-organized models of financial markets

Models to mimic the transmission of information in financial markets are introduced. As an attempt to generate the demand process, we distinguish between dictatorship associations, where groups of agents rely on one of them to make decision, and democratic associations, where each agent takes part in the group decision. In the dictatorship model, agents segregate into two distinct populations, while the democratic model is driven towards a critical state where groups of agents of all sizes exist. Hence, both models display a level of organization, but only the democratic model is self-organized. We show that the dictatorship model generates less-volatile markets than the democratic model

A Hypergraph Dictatorship Test with Perfect Completeness

A hypergraph dictatorship test is first introduced by Samorodnitsky and Trevisan and serves as a key component in their unique games based \PCP construction. Such a test has oracle access to a collection of functions and determines whether all the functions are the same dictatorship, or all their low degree influences are $o(1).$ Their test makes $q\geq3$ queries and has amortized query complexity $1+O(\frac{\log q}{q})$ but has an inherent loss of perfect completeness. In this paper we give an adaptive hypergraph dictatorship test that achieves both perfect completeness and amortized query complexity $1+O(\frac{\log q}{q})$.Comment: Some minor correction

The introduction of sickness insurance in Spain in the first decades of the Franco dictatorship (1939-1962)

[Abstract:]Using new statistical data on financing, coverage and economic and health care provisions, this article analyses how sickness insurance was introduced, managed and extended in Spain, under the Franco dictatorship, between 1939 and 1962. This article highlights how the dictatorship accelerated its implementation for political motives and this resulted in a failure of the system due to the lack of public financing and the high pharmaceutical, medical and infrastructure cost

Free composition instead of language dictatorship

Historically, programming languages have been—benevolent—dictators: reducing all possible semantics to specific ones offered by a few built-in language constructs. Over the years, some programming languages have freed the programmers from the restrictions to use only built-in libraries, built-in data types, and builtin type-checking rules. Even though—arguably—such freedom could lead to anarchy, or people shooting themselves in the foot, the contrary tends to be the case: a language that does not allow for extensibility is depriving software engineers of the ability to construct proper abstractions and to structure software in the most optimal way. Therefore the software becomes less structured and maintainable than would be possible if the software engineer could express the behavior of the program with the most appropriate abstractions. The idea proposed by this paper is to move composition from built-in language constructs to programmable, first-class abstractions in a language. We discuss several prototypes of the Co-op language, which show that it is possible, with a relatively simple model, to express a wide range of compositions as first-class concepts

Efficiency of Truthful and Symmetric Mechanisms in One-sided Matching

We study the efficiency (in terms of social welfare) of truthful and symmetric mechanisms in one-sided matching problems with {\em dichotomous preferences} and {\em normalized von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences}. We are particularly interested in the well-known {\em Random Serial Dictatorship} mechanism. For dichotomous preferences, we first show that truthful, symmetric and optimal mechanisms exist if intractable mechanisms are allowed. We then provide a connection to online bipartite matching. Using this connection, it is possible to design truthful, symmetric and tractable mechanisms that extract 0.69 of the maximum social welfare, which works under assumption that agents are not adversarial. Without this assumption, we show that Random Serial Dictatorship always returns an assignment in which the expected social welfare is at least a third of the maximum social welfare. For normalized von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences, we show that Random Serial Dictatorship always returns an assignment in which the expected social welfare is at least \frac{1}{e}\frac{\nu(\opt)^2}{n}, where \nu(\opt) is the maximum social welfare and $n$ is the number of both agents and items. On the hardness side, we show that no truthful mechanism can achieve a social welfare better than \frac{\nu(\opt)^2}{n}.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur

A Dictatorship of Meaning: Villainizing Multiple Perspectives

I read Louis De Caro\u27s John Brown the Abolitionist -- A Biographer\u27s Blog regularly because I deeply respect the work which DeCaro has done in researching Brown, particularly putting him into the context of his religious life. I assigned Fire from the Midst of You : A Religious Life of John Brown to the students in my class this semester on Brown, as it is an intriguing look at the abolitionist. But I read DeCaro\u27s blog because I don\u27t agree with him on many of his criticisms of how Brown is interpreted in a modern context. I try to follow a rule of thumb: you need to read those with whom you disagree voraciously, to keep you from growing complacent in your opinions. [excerpt