Regulating altruistic agents

Altruism or `regard for others' can encourage self-restraint among generators of negative externalities, thereby mitigating the externality problem. We explore how introducing impure altruism into standard regulatory settings alters regulatory prescriptions. We show that the optimal calibration of both quantitative controls and externality taxes are affected. It also leads to surprising results on the comparative performance of instruments. Under quantity-based regulation welfare is increasing in the propensity for altruism in the population; under price-based regulation the relationship is non-monotonic. Price-based regulation is preferred when the population is either predominantly altruistic or predominantly selfish, quantity-based regulation for cases in between

Sobre el contraste de pareceres: la tecnocracia franquista ante las nuevas fórmulas de representación política

La promoción de las asociaciones políticas vino condicionada por el articulado de la Ley Orgánica del Estado aprobada en 1967 como culminación del proceso institucional del franquismo. La redefinición del Movimiento como comunión de los españoles en los Principios Fundamentales de 1958, suponía el triunfo de la concepción ideológica tradicionalista asumida por el equipo de la Presidencia, frente a las posturas estatistas representadas por la Secretaría General del Movimiento. Esta dicotomía de pareceres en la definición institucional, venía animada tanto por la diversidad de tendencias en el seno del Régimen como por las repercusiones derivadas de la esfera internacional. En cualquier caso, la discusión de planteamientos sobre la participación política estaría condicionada por la rigidez intrínseca del sistema.------------------The promotion of the political associations was determined by the articles of the Organic Law of the State, approved in 1967 as the culmination of the institutional process of Franco’s regime. The redefinition of the Movement as the communion of the spaniards in the Fundamental Principles of 1958, supposed the triumph of the ideological traditionalist conception assumed by the Presidency’s team, over the totalitarian positions represented by the General Secretariat of the Movement. This dichotomy of opinions in the institutional definition, was encouraged by the diversity of trends inside the Regime as well as the repercussions derived from the international sphere. Nevertheless, the political participation discussion would be determined by the system’s own inflexibility

Learning Economic Parameters from Revealed Preferences

A recent line of work, starting with Beigman and Vohra (2006) and Zadimoghaddam and Roth (2012), has addressed the problem of {\em learning} a utility function from revealed preference data. The goal here is to make use of past data describing the purchases of a utility maximizing agent when faced with certain prices and budget constraints in order to produce a hypothesis function that can accurately forecast the {\em future} behavior of the agent. In this work we advance this line of work by providing sample complexity guarantees and efficient algorithms for a number of important classes. By drawing a connection to recent advances in multi-class learning, we provide a computationally efficient algorithm with tight sample complexity guarantees ($\Theta(d/\epsilon)$ for the case of $d$ goods) for learning linear utility functions under a linear price model. This solves an open question in Zadimoghaddam and Roth (2012). Our technique yields numerous generalizations including the ability to learn other well-studied classes of utility functions, to deal with a misspecified model, and with non-linear prices

Kejahatan Pencucian Uang (Money Laundering) (Tinjauan Undang-undang Nomor 8 Tahun 2010 Tentang Pencegahan dan Pemberantasan Tindak Pidana Pencucian Uang)

Penanganan tindak pidana Pencucian Uang di Indonesia dimulai sejak Undang Undang Nomor 15 Tahun 2002 telah diubah dengan Undang-Undang Nomor 25 Tahun 2003, telah menunjukkan arah positif. Namun, hasilnya belum optimal. Kenudian disusun Undang-Undang Nomor 8 tahun 2010 tentang Pencegahan dan Pemberantasan Tindak Pidana Pencucian Uang . Tujuan penelitian ini untuk membahas seberapa jauh Undang-Undang Nomor 8 Tahun 2010 tentang Pencegahan dan Pemberantasan Tindak Pidana Pencucian Uang, dapat diberlakukan secara efektif. Metode yang digunakan adalah studi pustaka dengan pendekatan deskriptif, eksploratif, dan analitis. Dapat disimpulkan antara lain bahwa: (1) adanya tindak pidana sebagaimana yang telah ditetapkan secara limitatif di dalam pasal 2 Undang-Undang Nomor 8 tahun 2010 terhadap dugaan adanya tindak pidana pencucian uang, tidak perlu dibuktikan terlebih dahulu, cukup jika ada dugaan bahwa uang tersebut berasal dari tindak pidana korupsi misalnya, dengan catatan jika terdapat dua alat bukti sebagai bukti permulaan; (2) tindak pidana pencucian uang secara kriminologis dikualifikasi sebagai kejahatan kerah putih (White Collar Crime), maka penggunaan metode pembuktian terbalik menjadi sangat relevan, hanya saja di dalam pelaksanaannya masih tergantung pada kemauan hakim. Disarankan agar semua unsur penegak hukum dalam sistem peradilan pidana dalam menghadapi kasus-kasus semacam ini, selain perlu integritas dan dedikasi kuat, juga harus memiliki keahlian yang khusus dan memadai dibantu oleh ahli di bidang sistem keuangan atau perbankan

The first INTEGRAL-OMC catalogue of optically variable sources

The Optical Monitoring Camera (OMC) onboard INTEGRAL provides photometry in the Johnson V-band. With an aperture of 50 mm and a field of view of 5deg x 5deg, OMC is able to detect optical sources brighter than V~18, from a previously selected list of potential targets of interest. After more than nine years of observations, the OMC database contains light curves for more than 70000 sources (with more than 50 photometric points each). The objectives of this work have been to characterize the potential variability of the objects monitored by OMC, to identify periodic sources and to compute their periods, taking advantage of the stability and long monitoring time of the OMC. To detect potential variability, we have performed a chi-squared test, finding 5263 variable sources out of an initial sample of 6071 objects with good photometric quality and more than 300 data points each. We have studied the periodicity of these sources using a method based on the phase dispersion minimization technique, optimized to handle light curves with very different shapes.In this first catalogue of variable sources observed by OMC, we provide for each object the median of the visual magnitude, the magnitude at maximum and minimum brightness in the light curve during the window of observations, the period, when found, as well as the complete intrinsic and period-folded light curves, together with some additional ancillary data.Comment: Accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics; 13 pages, 16 figures. Figures' resolution has been degraded to fit astro-ph constraint

Treatment response in relation to inflammatory and axonal surrogate marker in multiple sclerosis

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to investigate if treatment response could retrospectively be related to inflammatory or axonal pathology as measured by plasma surrogate markers. METHODS: In this 1-year observational study 30 multiple sclerosis (MS) patients with relapsing-remitting disease were treated with intramuscular IFNbeta-1a or subcutaneous IFNbeta-1b. Responders and nonresponders were defined according to clinical and magnetic resonance imaging criteria. The control group consisted of 14 healthy subjects. Plasma levels of surrogate markers for inflammation (nitric oxide metabolites (NOx)), astrocytic activation (S100B) and axonal damage (NfH(SM135)) were measured using standard assays. RESULTS: There were 11 nonresponders and 19 responders to IFNbeta treatment. Median S100B levels were elevated in a higher proportion of treatment responders (63%, 42.9 pg/mL) compared to nonresponders (18%, 11.7 pg/mL, P < 0.05, Fisher's exact test) and controls (0%, 2 pg/mL, P < 0.001). Levels of NOx were found to be more frequently elevated in nonresponders (72%, 39 microM) compared to healthy controls (0%, 37 microM, P < 0.05). Levels of NfH(SM135) were more frequently elevated in responders (58%, 300 pg/mL, P < 0.001) and nonresponders (72%, 500 pg/mL, P < 0.001) compared to controls (0%, 4.5 pg/mL). CONCLUSION: Patients with relapsing-remitting MS who had surrogate marker supported evidence for astrocytic activation responded more frequently to treatment with IFNbeta