318,935 research outputs found
Making Judges Independent – Some Proposals Regarding the Judiciary
It is argued that an independent judiciary is a necessary condition for both individual liberty and economic prosperity. After having surveyed the literature dealing with how to arrange for an independent judiciary, the authors derive some additional policy implications by drawing on two indicators of judicial independence (JI) recently introduced by them. De facto JI has a robust and highly significant impact on economic growth. Individual components of both de jure and de facto JI on economic growth are estimated for their impact on economic growth. Additionally, the effects of other institutional arrangements such as presidential vs. parliamentary systems are inquired into.judicial independence, constitutional design, positive constitutional economics, economic growth
Making Judges Independent – Some Proposals Regarding the Judiciary+
It is argued that an independent judiciary is a necessary condition for both individual liberty and economic prosperity. After having surveyed the literature dealing with how to arrange for an independent judiciary, the authors derive some additional policy implications by drawing on two indicators of judicial independence (JI) recently introduced by them. De facto JI has a robust and highly significant impact on economic growth. Individual components of both de jure and de facto JI on economic growth are estimated for their impact on economic growth. Additionally, the effects of other institutional arrangements such as presidential vs. parliamentary systems are inquired into.Judicial Independence, Constitutional design, Positive Constitutional Economics, Economic Growth
Robust randomized matchings
The following game is played on a weighted graph: Alice selects a matching
and Bob selects a number . Alice's payoff is the ratio of the weight of
the heaviest edges of to the maximum weight of a matching of size at
most . If guarantees a payoff of at least then it is called
-robust. In 2002, Hassin and Rubinstein gave an algorithm that returns
a -robust matching, which is best possible.
We show that Alice can improve her payoff to by playing a
randomized strategy. This result extends to a very general class of
independence systems that includes matroid intersection, b-matchings, and
strong 2-exchange systems. It also implies an improved approximation factor for
a stochastic optimization variant known as the maximum priority matching
problem and translates to an asymptotic robustness guarantee for deterministic
matchings, in which Bob can only select numbers larger than a given constant.
Moreover, we give a new LP-based proof of Hassin and Rubinstein's bound
Robust reputation independence in ranking systems for multiple sensitive attributes
Ranking systems have an unprecedented influence on how and what information people access, and their impact on our society is being analyzed from different perspectives, such as users’ discrimination. A notable example is represented by reputation-based ranking systems, a class of systems that rely on users’ reputation to generate a non-personalized item-ranking, proved to be biased against certain demographic classes. To safeguard that a given sensitive user’s attribute does not systematically affect the reputation of that user, prior work has operationalized a reputation independence constraint on this class of systems. In this paper, we uncover that guaranteeing reputation independence for a single sensitive attribute is not enough. When mitigating biases based on one sensitive attribute (e.g., gender), the final ranking might still be biased against certain demographic groups formed based on another attribute (e.g., age). Hence, we propose a novel approach to introduce reputation independence for multiple sensitive attributes simultaneously. We then analyze the extent to which our approach impacts on discrimination and other important properties of the ranking system, such as its quality and robustness against attacks. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our approach leads to less biased rankings with respect to multiple users’ sensitive attributes, without affecting the system’s quality and robustness
Order Independence and Rationalizability
Two natural strategy elimination procedures have been studied for strategic
games. The first one involves the notion of (strict, weak, etc) dominance and
the second the notion of rationalizability. In the case of dominance the
criterion of order independence allowed us to clarify which notions and under
what circumstances are robust. In the case of rationalizability this criterion
has not been considered. In this paper we investigate the problem of order
independence for rationalizability by focusing on three naturally entailed
reduction relations on games. These reduction relations are distinguished by
the adopted reference point for the notion of a better response. Additionally,
they are parametrized by the adopted system of beliefs. We show that for one
reduction relation the outcome of its (possibly transfinite) iterations does
not depend on the order of elimination of the strategies. This result does not
hold for the other two reduction relations. However, under a natural assumption
the iterations of all three reduction relations yield the same outcome. The
obtained order independence results apply to the frameworks considered in
Bernheim 84 and Pearce 84. For finite games the iterations of all three
reduction relations coincide and the order independence holds for three natural
systems of beliefs considered in the literature.Comment: Appeared in: Proc. of the 10th conference on Theoretical Aspects of
Rationality and Knowledge (TARK X), pp. 22-38 (2005
Robust design of large-displacement compliant mechanisms
The aim of this article is to introduce a new topology optimisation formulation for optimal robust design of Micro Electro Mechanical Systems. Mesh independence in topology optimisation is most often ensured by using filtering techniques, which result in transition grey regions difficult to interpret in practical realisations. This problem has been alleviated recently by projection techniques, but these destroy the mesh independence introduced by the filters and result in single node connected hinges. Such features in the design are undesirable as they are not robust with respect to geometric manufacturing errors (such as under/over etching). They can be avoided by optimising for several design realisations which take into account the possible geometry errors. The design variations are modelled with the help of random variables. The proposed stochastic formulation for the design variations results in nearly black and white mechanism designs, robust with respect to uncertainties in the production process, i.e. without any hinges or small details which can create manufacturing difficulties
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