A renewed approach to the foundations of SIA theory: generalizing SIA to incorporate multiple behavior hypotheses. Thoughts on the implicative intensity

The aim of this paper is to recall the foundations of SIA theory and modify these slightly in order to clarify and reinforce them, as well as make them more adaptable to various scientific models. Some issues regarding one of the founding blocks of SIA, the implicative intensity, are discussed and detailed. This paper is composed of two mostly separable sections. The first half of this paper focuses on a generalization of SIA so that known differences between individuals, which we shall refer to as multiple behaviors, can be taken into account in an analysis. The second half focuses on two issues related to the implicative intensity, the second of which being the well-known issue raised by large numbers of individuals in SIA data sets

Predicting the Profit Potential of a Microeconomic Process: An Information Theoretic/Thermodynamic Approach

Abstract It would be of great benefit if management could predict the huge profits that would result from modest investments in process improvement initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma and Complexity reduction. While the application of these initiatives was initially restricted to manufacturing, they have been expanded to transactional processes such as product development, marketing, and indeed all microeconomic processes... This paper derives an equation that, subject to further testing, appears to make such a profit prediction possible allowing a rational investment in microeconomic process improvement. That the profit of a company is greatly increased by the reduction of internal waste was originally demonstrated by Henry Ford, but has been greatly extended by Toyota. All waste in a process results in longer lead times, measured from the injection of work into the process until its delivery to the customer or user. Thus the increase in profit is principally driven by the reduction of lead time through process improvement. The lead time of any process is governed by the Queuing Theory formula known as Little’s Law. The central result of this paper is that the reduction lead time as expressed by Little’s Law leads to an equation for the reduction of process Entropy. The expression is identical with the reduction of entropy and thermodynamic waste in a heat engine. Case studies are used to estimate the magnitude of Boltzmann’s Constant for Microeconomic processes. The resulting Equation of Profit allows the prediction of the amount of waste cost elimination based on explicit Lean, Six Sigma and Complexity reduction process improvement parameters. More data is needed to more accurately estimate the magnitude of Boltzmann’s constant for microeconomic processes.Profit Increase Prediction; Process Entropy; Information; Complexity; Waste; Equation of Profit; Little’s Law; Business Analogies with Thermodynamics; Boltzmann’s Constant of Business; Carnot; Shannon

Limiting behaviour of random spatial graphs and asymptotically homogeneous RWRE

We consider several random spatial graphs of the nearest-neighbour type, including the k- nearest neighbours graph, the on-line nearest-neighbour graph, and the minimal directed spanning tree. We study the large sample asymptotic behaviour of the total length of these graphs, with power-weighted edges. We give laws of large numbers and weak convergence results. We evaluate limiting constants explicitly. In Bhatt and Roy's minimal directed spanning tree (MDST) construction on random points in (0,1)(^2)， each point is joined to its nearest neighbour in the south-westerly direction. We show that the limiting total length (with power-weighted egdes) of the edges joined to the origin converges in distribution to a Dickman-type random variable. We also study the length of the longest edge in the MDST. For the total weight of the MDST, we give a weak convergence result. The limiting distribution is given a normal component plus a contribution due to boundary effects, which can be characterized by a fixed point equation. There is a phase transition in the limit law as the weight exponent increases. In the second part of this thesis, we give criteria for ergodicity, transience and null recurrence for the random walk in random environment (RWRE) on z+ = {0,1,2,...}, with reflection at the origin, where the random environment is subject to a vanishing perturbation from the so-called Sinai's regime. Our results complement existing criteria for random walks in random environments and for Markov chains with asymptotically zero drift, and are significantly different to these previously studied cases. Our method is based on a martingale technique 一 the method of Lyapunov functions

Equilibrium concepts for social interaction models

equilibrium analysis;public choice