How to Compute Equilibrium Prices in 1891

Irving Fisher's Ph.D. thesis, submitted to Yale University in 1891, contains a fully articulated general equilibrium model presented with the broad scope and formal mathematical clarity associated with Walras and his successors. In addition, Fisher presents a remarkable hydraulic apparatus for calculating equilibrium prices and the resulting distribution of society's endowments among the agents in the economy. In this paper we provide an analytical description of Fisher's apparatus, and report the results of simulating the mechanical/hydraulic "machine," illustrating the ability of the apparatus to "compute" equilibrium prices and also to find multiple equilibria.Fisher, general equilibrium, hydraulic apparatus, equilibrium prices, computable general equilibrium, algorithms

The effects of topography on rotating barotropic flows

+152hlm.;24c

A two-dimensional angular-resolved proton spectrometer

We present a novel design of two-dimensional (2D) angular-resolved spectrometer for full beam characterization of ultrashort intense laser driven proton sources. A rotated 2D pinhole array was employed, as selective entrance before a pair of parallel permanent magnets, to sample the full proton beam into discrete beamlets. The proton beamlets are subsequently dispersed without overlapping onto a planar detector. Representative experimental result of protons generated from femtosecond intense laser interaction with thin foil target is presented

Gender Differences in Prisoners' Dilemma

Charles Darwin (1874) stated that "women are less selfish but men are more competitive". Very recent papers (Eckel & Grossman, 1998, 2001 or Andreoni & Vesterlund 2001, among others) have shown the relevance of gender in altruism in both ultimatum and dictator games. In this paper we analyse the role of gender in one-shot Prisoners' Dilemma. We use payments cards to reveal players' values of the game, what gives information about players' beliefs on rival's cooperativeness. Surprisingly 15% of population choose the cooperative action although the gender effect is quite ambiguous in actions. Within those players who choose the cooperative action, females do so believing her rival will defect.Prisoners' Dilemma, cooperation, payment cards, expected utility theory, beliefs, gender differences.

A novel Boolean kernels family for categorical data

Kernel based classifiers, such as SVM, are considered state-of-the-art algorithms and are widely used on many classification tasks. However, this kind of methods are hardly interpretable and for this reason they are often considered as black-box models. In this paper, we propose a new family of Boolean kernels for categorical data where features correspond to propositional formulas applied to the input variables. The idea is to create human-readable features to ease the extraction of interpretation rules directly from the embedding space. Experiments on artificial and benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed family of kernels with respect to established ones, such as RBF, in terms of classification accuracy

Product mixes as objects of choice in nonparametric efficiency measurement

Non-radial measures of technical efficiency essentially differ from their radial counterparts in that the product mix of the efficient reference is allowed to be different from the product mix of the evaluated observation. Whereas existing non-radial measures are still based on the product mix of the evaluated, i.e. possibly inefficient observation, we change the perspective and propose a measure based on the mix properties of the efficient reference. The resulting `inverse' measure can be considered as complementary to the Färe-Lovell (or "Russell") efficiency measure.Data Envelopment Analysis; Non-radial efficiency measures; Product mix benchmarking

Product Mixes as Objects of Choice in Nonparametric Efficiency Measurement

Non-radial measures of technical efficiency essentially differ from their radial counterparts in that the product mix of the efficient reference is allowed to be different from the product mix of the evaluated observation. Whereas existing non-radial measures are still based on the product mix of the evaluated, i.e. possibly inefficient observation, we change the perspective and propose a measure based on the mix properties of the efficient reference. The resulting `inverse' measure can be considered as complementary to the Färe-Lovell (or ``Russell'') efficiency measure.Data Envelopment Analysis, Non-radial efficiency measures, Product mix benchmarking

Sustainability levels in Irish dairy farming: a farm typology according to sustainable performance indicators

Feeding the world’s population in a sustainable manner is one of the key challenges facing the future of global agriculture. The recent removal of the milk quota regime in the European Union has prompted an expansionary phase in dairy farming, especially in Ireland. Achieving this expansion in a sustainable manner is crucial to the long-term survival and success of the Irish dairy sector. In this paper we examine the sustainability of Irish dairy farming, defining ‘sustainability’ as economically profitable, environmentally friendly and socially efficient. A typology of Irish dairy farms has been created using data on profitability, environmental efficiency and social integration derived from the Teagasc National Farm Survey. Economic, social and environmental performance indicators were determined and aggregated and then used in a multivariate analysis for the identification and classification of farm clusters. The purpose of this study to classify Irish dairy farms using performance indicators, thereby, assisting policy makers in identifying patterns in farm performance with a view to formulating more targeted policies. Two of the three clusters elicited from the analysis were similar in regards to their respective indicator scores. However, the remaining cluster was found to perform poorly in comparison. The results indicate a clear distinction between ‘good’ and ‘weak’ performers, and the positive relationship between the economic, environmental and social performance of Irish dairy farms is evident