Movers and shakers

Most projects, in most walks of life, require the participation of multiple parties. While it is difficult to unite individuals in a common endeavor, some people, who we call “movers and shakers,” seem able to do it. The paper specifically examines moving and shaking of an investment project, whose return depends both on its quality and the total capital invested in it. We analyze a model with two types of agents: managers and investors. Managers and investors initially form social connections. Managers then bid to buy control of the project and the winning bidder puts effort into making investors aware of it. Finally, a subset of aware investors are given the chance to invest and they decide whether to do so after receiving private signals of the project’s quality. We first show that connections are valuable since they make it easier for a manager to “move and shake” the project (i.e., obtain capital from investors). When we endogenize the network, we find that, while managers are identical ex ante, a single manager emerges as most connected; he consequently earns a rent. In extensions, we move away from the assumption of ex ante identical managers to highlight forces that lead one manager or another to become a mover and shaker. Our theory sheds light on a range of topics including: entrepreneurship, venture capital, and anchor investments

Paradoxes versus formalism in economics. Evidence from the early years of game theory and experimental economics

This paper argues that the acceptance of two recent methodological advances in economics, namely game theory and laboratory experimentation, was affected by the history dependence constraining the formalization of economics. After an early period in which the two methods were coolly received by economists because their applications challenged some basic hypotheses of mainstream economics, their subsequent acceptance was the result of the corroboration of those same hypotheses. However, the recent emergence of some paradoxes has finally revealed that the effectiveness of game theory and experimental techniques in economics is improved when descriptively implausible and normatively unsatisfactory assumptions such as the centrality of individual maximization in decision theory and the definition of rationality as consistency in preferences are revised.paradoxes, game theory, experiments, individual maximization, economic rationality

Challenging the Computational Metaphor: Implications for How We Think

This paper explores the role of the traditional computational metaphor in our thinking as computer scientists, its influence on epistemological styles, and its implications for our understanding of cognition. It proposes to replace the conventional metaphor--a sequence of steps--with the notion of a community of interacting entities, and examines the ramifications of such a shift on these various ways in which we think

Semantic transferability and prototypicality in Chinese and English: a study of the semantic acquisition of thin by Chinese learners of English

In the field of second language (L2) acquisition, researchers as well as L2 teachers have long been aware of the difference in lexical usage patterns and in the meaning ascribed to L2 words by native speakers and by L2 learners. It has been observed that L2 learners appear to use more words of general than of specific meaning, tend to both overextend and underextend word meanings, and often fail to respond to constraints of register and collocation. In the case of polysemous words, it is also found that L2 learners acquire some meanings but not others. Idioms and figurative language present great problems for L2 learners. All these facts seem to indicate there are constraints on L2 learners\u27 lexical acquisition. However, what these constraints are is not fully known

Trajectories through temporal networks

What do football passes and financial transactions have in common? Both are networked walk processes that we can observe, where records take the form of timestamped events that move something tangible from one node to another. Here we propose an approach to analyze this type of data that extracts the actual trajectories taken by the tangible items involved. The main advantage of analyzing the resulting trajectories compared to using, e.g., existing temporal network analysis techniques, is that sequential, temporal, and domain-specific aspects of the process are respected and retained. As a result, the approach lets us produce contextually-relevant insights. Demonstrating the usefulness of this technique, we consider passing play within association football matches (an unweighted process) and e-money transacted within a mobile money system (a weighted process). Proponents and providers of mobile money care to know how these systems are used-using trajectory extraction we find that 73% of e-money was used for stand-alone tasks and only 21.7% of account holders built up substantial savings at some point during a 6-month period. Coaches of football teams and sports analysts are interested in strategies of play that are advantageous. Trajectory extraction allows us to replicate classic results from sports science on data from the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Moreover, we are able to distinguish teams that consistently exhibited complex, multi-player dynamics of play during the 2017-2018 club season using ball passing trajectories, coincidentally identifying the winners of the five most competitive first-tier domestic leagues in Europe.Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

The Bingo Project: Rethinking Gambling Regulation

Permission to include this report in the Institute research repository granted by Sarah Slowe, University of Kent on January 30, 2017.Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, one of the UK’s main academic research funders, the three-year project selected four case studies of bingo in England and Wales, Canada, Brazil, and online in the European Union. We wanted to gain a good overview of the diverse ways in which bingo is played (online versus land-based; in commercial halls versus in charitable facilities), and of legal approaches (e.g. criminal prohibition, licensing as charitable activity; licensing as commercial activity).YesEconomic and Social Research Council [U.K.

Lost in Space No Longer: The Visionary Union of \u27The Wire\u27

In its serial space, David Simon’s The Wire season two relates the seemingly “disconnected” union men, foreign sex worker women, and African-American drug traders and crosses constructed boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and geography to evoke the possibility of a transnational working class. The Wire’s serialized narrative trespasses the limitations of money and numbers games and of individual characters to build, scene by scene, what Roderick Ferguson calls in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique “the location for new and emergent identifications and social relations” (108)