Measuring Partial Membership in Categories: Alternative Tools

Governmen

Inverse limit spaces satisfying a Poincare inequality

We give conditions on Gromov-Hausdorff convergent inverse systems of metric measure graphs (and certain higher dimensional inverse systems of metric measure spaces) which imply that the measured Gromov-Hausdorff limit (equivalently, the inverse limit) is a PI space, i.e. it satisfies a doubling condition and a Poincare inequality in the sense of Heinonen-Koskela. We also give a systematic construction of examples for which our conditions are satisfied. Included are known examples of PI spaces, such as Laakso spaces, and a large class of new examples. Generically our graph examples have the property that they do not bilipschitz embed in any Banach space with Radon-Nikodym property, but they do embed in the Banach space L_1. For Laakso spaces, these facts were discussed in our earlier papers

Using fuzzy numbers and OWA operators in the weighted average and its application in decision making

Se presenta un nuevo método para tratar situaciones de incertidumbre en los que se utiliza el operador OWAWA (media ponderada – media ponderada ordenada). A este operador se le denomina operador OWAWA borroso (FOWAWA). Su principal ventaja se encuentra en la posibilidad de representar la información incierta del problema mediante el uso de números borrosos los cuales permiten una mejor representación de la información ya que consideran el mínimo y el máximo resultado posible y la posibilidad de ocurrencia de los valores internos. Se estudian diferentes propiedades y casos particulares de este nuevo modelo. También se analiza la aplicabilidad de este operador y se desarrolla un ejemplo numérico sobre toma de decisiones en la selección de políticas fiscalesWe present a new approach for dealing with an uncertain environment when using the ordered weighted averaging – weighted averaging (OWAWA) operator. We call it the fuzzy OWAWA (FOWAWA) operator. The main advantage of this new aggregation operator is that it is able to represent the uncertain information with fuzzy numbers. Thus, we are able to give more complete information because we can consider the maximum and the minimum of the problem and the internal information between these two results. We study different properties and different particular cases of this approach. We also analyze the applicability of the new model and we develop a numerical example in a decision making problem about selection of fiscal policies

The commodity chain of the household: from survey design to policy and practice

Data collection and analysis and policy formulation all require a social unit to be defined, generally called the household. Multidisciplinary evidence shows that households as defined by survey practitioners often bear little resemblance to lived socio-economic units. This study examines how a shared language, the 'household', can generate misunderstandings because different groups with distinctive understandings of the term 'household' are often unaware that others may be using ‘household’ differently. Results from 4 interlinked and iterative methods are presented: review of household survey documentation (1950s-present); ethnographic ground-truthing fieldwork; in-depth key informant interviews; and modelling. Results show that whereas data collectors have a clear idea of what a `household` is, data users are often unaware of the nuances of the constraints imposed by data collection. This has implications for policy planning and practice. What interviewees consider when they think of their household can differ systematically from data collectors' definitions

Do Social Relations Affect Economic Welfare? A Microeconomic Empirical Analysis

Over the last few years, many studies have shown that social networks affect the socioeconomic development. This paper presents evidence, through the Italian microdata representative of the entire Italian population, that the quality and quantity of interpersonal relations of agents can increase their economic welfare. Two proxies of interpersonal relations at an individual level are considered: a proxy for the density and one for the quality of network structure of personal contacts. Both seem to have a positive effect on the level of household economic welfare of agents. This result proves robust to the inclusion of a variety of control variables and to the use of different econometric methods.Networks, Social Interactions, Household Economic Welfare, Microdata, Fuzzy Logic