Quantum Theory is a Quasi-stochastic Process Theory

There is a long history of representing a quantum state using a quasi-probability distribution: a distribution allowing negative values. In this paper we extend such representations to deal with quantum channels. The result is a convex, strongly monoidal, functorial embedding of the category of trace preserving completely positive maps into the category of quasi-stochastic matrices. This establishes quantum theory as a subcategory of quasi-stochastic processes. Such an embedding is induced by a choice of minimal informationally complete POVM's. We show that any two such embeddings are naturally isomorphic. The embedding preserves the dagger structure of the categories if and only if the POVM's are symmetric, giving a new use of SIC-POVM's, objects that are of foundational interest in the QBism community. We also study general convex embeddings of quantum theory and prove a dichotomy that such an embedding is either trivial or faithful.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2017, arXiv:1802.0973

Lobbying and Information in Politics

The vast majority of papers written about interest groups ’ political in uence focuses on the role of money in politics. Business and interest groups ’ partici-pation in campaign nance, in the form of hard and soft money, has been the subject of hundreds of theoretical and empirical studies. Moreover, with the recent congressional moves to reform campaign nance laws, campaign nance studies have received a prominent position in public discourse. There are two striking results about this line of academic work. First, political action committees (PACs) gave $245 million to congressional candidates in form of campaign contributions in the 1999–2000 election cycle (about$123 million annually), and corporations, unions, and interest groups gave $153 million in “soft money ” to political parties during the 1997–1998 election cycle (about$76 million annually).1 Yet, Congress controls a $2 trillion budget, nearly 40 percent of which is discretionary spending. This raises a potential puzzle: why do interest groups pay so little ($200 million annually) to try to in uence policy? To answer this question, we turn to a second striking result from the academi

When Do Interest Groups Use Electronic Rulemaking?

This paper analyzes how electronic rulemaking is affecting the propensity of interest groups to file comments and replies at the Federal Communications Commission. The paper shows that exogenous events and a handful of issues drive filing behavior. Implications of the analysis are discussed

Committee Jurisdiction, Congressional Behavior and Policy Outcomes

The literature on congressional committees has largely overlooked the impact of jurisdictional fights on policy proposals and outcomes. This paper develops a theory of how legislators balance the benefits of expanded committee jurisdiction against preferred policy outcomes. It shows why a) senior members and young members in safe districts are most likely to challenge a committee’s jurisdiction; b) policy proposals may be initiated off the proposer’s ideal point in order to obtain jurisdiction; c) policy outcomes will generally be more moderate with jurisdictional fights than without these turf wars. We empirically investigate these results examining proposed Internet intellectual property protection legislation in the 106th Congress

Electroweak Vacuum Stability and the Seesaw Mechanism Revisited

We study the electroweak vacuum stability in Type I seesaw models for 3 generations of neutrinos in scenarios where the right-handed neutrinos have explicit bare mass terms in the Lagrangian and where these are dynamically generated through the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. To best highlight the difference of the two cases we concentrate on the absolute stability of the scalar potential. We observe that for the first scenario, the scale at which the scalar potential becomes unstable is lower from that within the Standard Model. In addition the Yukawa couplings $\mathbf{Y}_\nu$ are constrained such that \Tr{[\mathbf{Y}^{\dagger}_\nu \mathbf{Y}_{\nu}}] \lesssim10^{-3}. In the second scenario the electroweak stability can be improved in a large region of parameter space. However, we found that the scalar used to break the lepton number symmetry cannot be too light and have a large coupling to right-handed neutrinos in order for the seesaw mechanism to be a valid mechanism for neutrino mass generation. In this case we have \Tr [\mathbf{Y}^\dagger_{\nu} \mathbf{Y}_\nu]\lesssim 0.01