Punishment, Inequality and Emotions

Cooperation among people who are not related to each other is sustained by the availability of punishment devices which help enforce social norms (Fehr and Gächter, 2002). However, the rationale for costly punishment remains unclear. This paper reports the results of an experiment investigating inequality aversion and negative emotions as possible determinants of punishment. We compare two treatments of a public good game, one in which costly punishment reduces the immediate payoff inequality between the punisher and the target, and one in which it does not affect inequality. We show that while inequality-aversion prevents some subjects from punishing in the equal cost treatment, negative emotions are the primary motive for punishment. Results also indicate that the intensity of punishment increases with the level of inequality, and reduces earnings inequality over time.cooperation ; experiment ; Free-Riding ; inequity aversion ; negative emotions

Does Monitoring Decrease Work Effort? The Complementarity Between Agency and Crowding-Out Theories

Agency theory assumes that tighter monitoring by the principal should motivate the agent to raise his effort level. In contrast, the “crowding-out” literature suggests that tighter monitoring may reduce the overall work effort. These two assertions are not necessarily contradictory provided that the nature of the employment relationship is taken into account (Frey 1993). This paper reports on the results of a real-effort laboratory experiment designed to test the relative importance of the disciplining effect and the crowding-out effect of monitoring. We find no strong support for the crowding-out hypothesis and we show that the disciplining effect of monitoring dominates in abstract one-shot relationships as well as in somewhat more interpersonal multi-shot relationships. Principals are not trustful enough to refrain from using the monitoring opportunity and most agents react to a decrease in the monitoring intensity by decreasing their effort.

Punishment, inequality, and welfare : a public good experiment

This paper reports the results of an experiment that investigates the relationships between inequality and punishment. In particular, we analyze how inter-personal comparisons affect altruistic punishment behavior. In addition, we examine how punishment affects inequality over time. We compare two treatments of a two-stage public good game, one in which costly punishment reduces the immediate payoff inequality between the punisher and the target, and one in which it does not affect the current level of inequality. Our results indicate that subjects punish even when they cannot alter the current distribution of payoffs. We find however that in both treatments, the intensity of punishment increases in the level of inequality. Finally, despite its cost, we show that punishment improves welfare in association with a decrease in the level of inequality over time.public good experiment ; punishment ; inequality aversion ; free-riding ; welfare

Lightweight Multilingual Software Analysis

Developer preferences, language capabilities and the persistence of older languages contribute to the trend that large software codebases are often multilingual, that is, written in more than one computer language. While developers can leverage monolingual software development tools to build software components, companies are faced with the problem of managing the resultant large, multilingual codebases to address issues with security, efficiency, and quality metrics. The key challenge is to address the opaque nature of the language interoperability interface: one language calling procedures in a second (which may call a third, or even back to the first), resulting in a potentially tangled, inefficient and insecure codebase. An architecture is proposed for lightweight static analysis of large multilingual codebases: the MLSA architecture. Its modular and table-oriented structure addresses the open-ended nature of multiple languages and language interoperability APIs. We focus here as an application on the construction of call-graphs that capture both inter-language and intra-language calls. The algorithms for extracting multilingual call-graphs from codebases are presented, and several examples of multilingual software engineering analysis are discussed. The state of the implementation and testing of MLSA is presented, and the implications for future work are discussed.Comment: 15 page

Monotone and Consistent discretization of the Monge-Ampere operator

We introduce a novel discretization of the Monge-Ampere operator, simultaneously consistent and degenerate elliptic, hence accurate and robust in applications. These properties are achieved by exploiting the arithmetic structure of the discrete domain, assumed to be a two dimensional cartesian grid. The construction of our scheme is simple, but its analysis relies on original tools seldom encountered in numerical analysis, such as the geometry of two dimensional lattices, and an arithmetic structure called the Stern-Brocot tree. Numerical experiments illustrate the method's efficiency

Charge localization in multiply charged clusters and their electrical properties: Some insights into electrospray droplets

The surface composition of charged Lennard-Jones clusters A$_N^{n+}$, composed of N particles (55 \leq N \leq 1169) among which n are positively charged with charge q, thus having a net total charge Q = nq, is investigated by Monte Carlo with Parallel Tempering simulations. At finite temperature, the surface sites of these charged clusters are found to be preferentially occupied by charged particles carrying large charges, due to Coulombic repulsions, but the full occupancy of surface sites is rarely achieved for clusters below the stability limit defined in this work. Large clusters (N = 1169) follow the same trends, with a smaller propensity for positive particles to occupy the cluster surface at non-zero temperature. We show that these charged clusters rather behave as electrical spherical conductors for the smaller sizes (N \leq 147) but as spheres uniformly charged in their volume for the larger sizes (N = 1169).Comment: 10 pages and 4 figure