3,897 research outputs found
Production and financial decisions under uncertainty
This paper proposes a model of an incomplete markets economy with pro- duction, in which the firm acts as financial innovator by issuing claims against its stock. The firm’s objective is to maximize its adjusted value, which is the sum of the market value and the shareholders’ surplus from their trades in the stock markets. If a firm maximizes its adjusted value, then its financial policy is relevant (i.e., Modigliani-Miller theorem does not hold), equilibrium outcomes are stable to shareholders’ renegotiation and endogenously incomplete markets typically arise at the equilibrium. If the firm is competitive in the financial markets, the adjusted value coincides with the Grossman-Hart objective.firm’s objective, incomplete markets, shareholder preferences
Efficient Prediction Designs for Random Fields
For estimation and predictions of random fields it is increasingly
acknowledged that the kriging variance may be a poor representative of true
uncertainty. Experimental designs based on more elaborate criteria that are
appropriate for empirical kriging are then often non-space-filling and very
costly to determine. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using a
compound criterion inspired by an equivalence theorem type relation to build
designs quasi-optimal for the empirical kriging variance, when space-filling
designs become unsuitable. Two algorithms are proposed, one relying on
stochastic optimization to explicitly identify the Pareto front, while the
second uses the surrogate criteria as local heuristic to chose the points at
which the (costly) true Empirical Kriging variance is effectively computed. We
illustrate the performance of the algorithms presented on both a simple
simulated example and a real oceanographic dataset
Prioritized Repairing and Consistent Query Answering in Relational Databases
A consistent query answer in an inconsistent database is an answer obtained
in every (minimal) repair. The repairs are obtained by resolving all conflicts
in all possible ways. Often, however, the user is able to provide a preference
on how conflicts should be resolved. We investigate here the framework of
preferred consistent query answers, in which user preferences are used to
narrow down the set of repairs to a set of preferred repairs. We axiomatize
desirable properties of preferred repairs. We present three different families
of preferred repairs and study their mutual relationships. Finally, we
investigate the complexity of preferred repairing and computing preferred
consistent query answers.Comment: Accepted to the special SUM'08 issue of AMA
Applications of Repeated Games in Wireless Networks: A Survey
A repeated game is an effective tool to model interactions and conflicts for
players aiming to achieve their objectives in a long-term basis. Contrary to
static noncooperative games that model an interaction among players in only one
period, in repeated games, interactions of players repeat for multiple periods;
and thus the players become aware of other players' past behaviors and their
future benefits, and will adapt their behavior accordingly. In wireless
networks, conflicts among wireless nodes can lead to selfish behaviors,
resulting in poor network performances and detrimental individual payoffs. In
this paper, we survey the applications of repeated games in different wireless
networks. The main goal is to demonstrate the use of repeated games to
encourage wireless nodes to cooperate, thereby improving network performances
and avoiding network disruption due to selfish behaviors. Furthermore, various
problems in wireless networks and variations of repeated game models together
with the corresponding solutions are discussed in this survey. Finally, we
outline some open issues and future research directions.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables, 168 reference
Optimal Income Taxation and Public-Goods Provision with Preference and Productivity Shocks
We study how an optimal income tax and an optimal public-goods provision rule respond to preference and productivity shocks. A conventional Mirrleesian treatment is shown to provoke manipulations of the policy mechanism by individuals with similar interests. We therefore extend the Mirrleesian model so as to include a requirement of coalition-proofness. The main results are the following: first, the possibility of preference shocks yields a new set of collective incentive constraints. Productivity shocks have no such implication. Second, the optimal policy gives rise to a positive correlation between the public-goods provision level, the extent of redistribution and marginal tax rates.Public Goods, Optimal Taxation, Mechanism Design
Fair social decision under uncertainty and belief disagreements
This paper aims to address two issues related to simultaneous aggregation of utilities and beliefs. The first one is related to how to integrate both inequality and uncertainty considerations into social decision making. The second one is related to how social decision should take disagreements in beliefs into account. To accomplish this, whereas individuals are assumed to abide by Savage model’s of subjective expected utility, society is assumed to prescribe, either to each individual when the ex ante individual well-being is favored or to itself when the ex post individual well-being is favored, acting in accordance with the maximin expected utility theory of Gilboa and Schmeidler (J Math Econ 18:141–153, 1989). Furthermore, it adapts an ex ante Pareto-type condition proposed by Gayer et al. (J Legal Stud 43:151–171, 2014), which says that a prospect Pareto dominates another one if the former gives a higher expected utility than the latter one, for each individual, for all individuals’ beliefs. In the context where the ex ante individual welfare is favored, our ex ante Pareto-type condition is shown to be equivalent to social utility taking the form of a MaxMinMin social welfare function, as well as to the individual set of priors being contained within the range of individual beliefs. However, when the ex post individual welfare is favored, the same Pareto-type condition is shown to be equivalent to social utility taking the form of a MaxMinMin social welfare function, as well as to the social set of priors containing only weighted averages of individual beliefs
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