28,045 research outputs found
Carl Menger and Friedrich von Wieser on the Role of Knowledge and Beliefs in the Emergence and Evolution of Institutions
In this article we start from the well-known contribution of the Austrian school with respect to the problem of knowledge and its role in inter- individual coordination. Focusing on two authors of this school - his founding father Carl Menger and Friedrich von Wieser, we show that the y both appreciate the role of knowledge in the emergence of economic and social institutions. However, their divergences regarding methodological individualism and subjectivism lead them to provide two different perspectives concerning the emergence and dynamics of institutions. This is exemplified by Menger and Wieserâs way of dealing with the emergence of money: on one hand, Menger takes for granted the involuntary formation of shared knowledge about the validity of social institutions such as money; on the other hand, Wieser favours an explanation whereby collective beliefs are more than shared knowledge since they do have some autonomy vis-Ă -vis individuals.
Statistics for the Luria-Delbr\"uck distribution
The Luria-Delbr\"uck distribution is a classical model of mutations in cell
kinetics. It is obtained as a limit when the probability of mutation tends to
zero and the number of divisions to infinity. It can be interpreted as a
compound Poisson distribution (for the number of mutations) of exponential
mixtures (for the developing time of mutant clones) of geometric distributions
(for the number of cells produced by a mutant clone in a given time). The
probabilistic interpretation, and a rigourous proof of convergence in the
general case, are deduced from classical results on Bellman-Harris branching
processes. The two parameters of the Luria-Delbr\"uck distribution are the
expected number of mutations, which is the parameter of interest, and the
relative fitness of normal cells compared to mutants, which is the heavy tail
exponent. Both can be simultaneously estimated by the maximum likehood method.
However, the computation becomes numerically unstable as soon as the maximal
value of the sample is large, which occurs frequently due to the heavy tail
property. Based on the empirical generating function, robust estimators are
proposed and their asymptotic variance is given. They are comparable in
precision to maximum likelihood estimators, with a much broader range of
calculability, a better numerical stability, and a negligible computing time
Dynamic robust duality in utility maximization
A celebrated financial application of convex duality theory gives an explicit
relation between the following two quantities:
(i) The optimal terminal wealth of the problem
to maximize the expected -utility of the terminal wealth
generated by admissible portfolios in a market
with the risky asset price process modeled as a semimartingale;
(ii) The optimal scenario of the dual problem to minimize
the expected -value of over a family of equivalent local
martingale measures , where is the convex conjugate function of the
concave function .
In this paper we consider markets modeled by It\^o-L\'evy processes. In the
first part we use the maximum principle in stochastic control theory to extend
the above relation to a \emph{dynamic} relation, valid for all .
We prove in particular that the optimal adjoint process for the primal problem
coincides with the optimal density process, and that the optimal adjoint
process for the dual problem coincides with the optimal wealth process, . In the terminal time case we recover the classical duality
connection above. We get moreover an explicit relation between the optimal
portfolio and the optimal measure . We also obtain that the
existence of an optimal scenario is equivalent to the replicability of a
related -claim.
In the second part we present robust (model uncertainty) versions of the
optimization problems in (i) and (ii), and we prove a similar dynamic relation
between them. In particular, we show how to get from the solution of one of the
problems to the other. We illustrate the results with explicit examples
Crossings of smooth shot noise processes
In this paper, we consider smooth shot noise processes and their expected
number of level crossings. When the kernel response function is sufficiently
smooth, the mean number of crossings function is obtained through an integral
formula. Moreover, as the intensity increases, or equivalently, as the number
of shots becomes larger, a normal convergence to the classical Rice's formula
for Gaussian processes is obtained. The Gaussian kernel function, that
corresponds to many applications in physics, is studied in detail and two
different regimes are exhibited.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AAP807 the Annals of
Applied Probability ( http://www.imstat.org/aap/ ) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Carl Menger and Friedrich von Wieser on the role of knowledge and beliefs
?Knowledge ; philosophical roots of knowledge ; economic traditions
Innovation and Business Cycles
The main purpose of this chapter is to assess the originality of Schumpeter's theory of business cycles. The first section outlines the distinctive features of Schumpeter's approach to business cycles and economic dynamics. Section two looks at the mechanisms constituting the cycle in Schumpeter's two major contributions on this subject, the Theory of Economic Development (1911) and Business Cycles (1939).Business cycles ; Schumpeter ; economic development
Short-term manpower management in manufacturing systems: new requirements and DSS prototyping
The short-term planning and scheduling of discrete manufacturing systems has mostly focused in the past on the management of machines, implicitly considered as the critical resources of the workshops. Some of the present schedulers claim to also manage human resources, but perform most of the time a local allocation of operators to machines, these operators having regular working hours. However, it seems clear that the workforce has a specificity that should be better taken into account by short-term planning facilities. Moreover, the variability of the weekly working hours through the year will shortly become a rule and not anymore an exception. On the base of a questionnaire answered by 19 French companies of different sizes and industrial sectors, we have tried to identify more precisely some industrial requirements concerning the short-term management of human resources. The growing interest in annualised hours together with the lack of software tools that allow to implement it practically is one of the results of this questionnaire. We suggest in this article the specification of a decision support system for short-term manpower management under annualised hours, taking into account the competence of the operators. A software prototype has been developed according to these specifications; the results of a simple but representative example are described
A Parameterized Algebra for Event Notification Services
Event notification services are used in various applications such as digital libraries, stock tickers, traffic control, or facility management. However, to our knowledge, a common semantics of events in event notification services has not been defined so far. In this paper, we propose a parameterized event algebra which describes the semantics of composite events for event notification systems. The parameters serve as a basis for flexible handling of duplicates in both primitive and composite events
- âŠ