The European Commission as a Constraint on its own Antitrust Policy

Although the legal and the political-scientific literatures on European competition policy (‘ECP’) are vast, there is no work that goes beyond the rationalization of stylized historical and/or legal facts. This approach may be justified on grounds of the political complexity of ECP and/or the heterogeneity of units of analysis. Nevertheless, the failure to come up with a positive device that identifies conditions under which specific policy decisions may or may not be possible has limited our assessments of the policy to value judgments rather than to true explanations. This paper attempts to remedy this situation by offering a logically complete and internally consistent model of ECP decision-making procedures. I show how the dependence of the European antitrust regulator (DG COMP) on a heterogeneous, multi-task and collegial organization (the Commission) severely constrains the feasible policy options of the former, and I argue that the nature and the goals of ECP are a function of (a) the ability of DG COMP to rely on national authorities, and (b) the distance between the ideal policy points of, on the one hand, the pivotal Directorate General in the Commission and, on the other hand, DG COMP and its internal opponents. Empirical work should follow

How I won the "Chess Ratings - Elo vs the Rest of the World" Competition

This article discusses in detail the rating system that won the kaggle competition "Chess Ratings: Elo vs the rest of the world". The competition provided a historical dataset of outcomes for chess games, and aimed to discover whether novel approaches can predict the outcomes of future games, more accurately than the well-known Elo rating system. The winning rating system, called Elo++ in the rest of the article, builds upon the Elo rating system. Like Elo, Elo++ uses a single rating per player and predicts the outcome of a game, by using a logistic curve over the difference in ratings of the players. The major component of Elo++ is a regularization technique that avoids overfitting these ratings. The dataset of chess games and outcomes is relatively small and one has to be careful not to draw "too many conclusions" out of the limited data. Many approaches tested in the competition showed signs of such an overfitting. The leader-board was dominated by attempts that did a very good job on a small test dataset, but couldn't generalize well on the private hold-out dataset. The Elo++ regularization takes into account the number of games per player, the recency of these games and the ratings of the opponents. Finally, Elo++ employs a stochastic gradient descent scheme for training the ratings, and uses only two global parameters (white's advantage and regularization constant) that are optimized using cross-validation

Using ontologies to support and critique decisions

Supporting decision making in the working environment has long being pursued by practitioners across a variety of fields, ranging from sociology and operational research to cognitive and computer scientists. A number of computer-supported systems and various technologies have been used over the years, but as we move into more global and flexible organisational structures, new technologies and challenges arise. In this paper, I argue for an ontology-based solution and present some of the early prototypes we have been developing, assess their impact on the decision making process and elaborate on the costs involved

Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

Anomalous fermion number nonconservation: Paradoxes in the level crossing picture

In theories with anomalous fermion number nonconservation, the level crossing picture is considered a faithful representation of the fermionic quantum number variation. It represents each created fermion by an energy level that crosses the zero-energy line from below. If several fermions of various masses are created, the level crossing picture contains several levels that cross the zero-energy line and cross each other. However, we know from quantum mechanics that the corresponding levels cannot cross if the different fermions are mixed via some interaction potential. The simultaneous application of these two requirements on the level behavior leads to paradoxes. For instance, a naive interpretation of the resulting level crossing picture gives rise to charge nonconservation. In this paper, we resolve this paradox by a precise calculation of the transition probability, and discuss what are the implications for the electroweak theory. In particular, the nonperturbative transition probability is higher if top quarks are present in the initial state.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figure