38,856 research outputs found
Moral Hazard and Capital Requirements in a Lending Model of Credit Denial
In this paper we analyze a repeated game in which an intermediary offers unsecured loans to entrepreneurs using future credit denial to induce repayment. To finance the loans, the intermediary uses a combination of equity capital and external funds. We focus on a moral hazard problem that emerges between the intermediary and the less informed external investors over a costly loan monitoring choice. The presence of informed borrowers in the lenderâs portfolio turns out to act as a substitute for capital requirements. The result is that the lending strategy utilized by the intermediary minimizes the moral hazard problem but implies the intermediaryâs balance sheet is fragile to exogenous risk.Moral hazard; Capital requirements; Bank regulation; Repayment incentives
Discussing Concepts of Terrorist Rationality: Implications for Counter-Terrorism Policy
Scholars of terrorism studies have long struggled to agree on a common understanding of what terrorism is. To date, they have agreed on little more than the fact that terrorism is difficult to define. As a consequence, more than 100, if not more than 200 modern definitions of terrorism have been formulated. Within those definitions, different aspects of terrorism are stressed including the underlying motivations, applied tactics and chosen targets. While no consensus has been found on how to define terrorism or terrorists, a meta-study by Schmid and Jongman (1988) provides fruitful insight into the most relevant aspects of definitions of terrorism which have proven valid to the present day. The two researchers analyzed various academic and official definitions of terrorism and identified three main elements as being vital to define terrorism; (1) the use (or threat) of violence1, (2) political objectives and (3) the intention of sowing fear in a target population as a means of achieving these political objectives.
The Dutch UMTS-Auction
In this paper I review the Dutch UMTS-auction that took place in the summer of 2000 and which, in contrast to the UK and German auctions, was generally considered to be a major flop. I analyse the policy process leading to the auction as well as the bidding behaviour in the auction, and provide an evaluation of both. I demonstrate that the case contains several useful lessons for other auction design problems.auctions, telecommunications
Learning scale-variant and scale-invariant features for deep image classification
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) require large image corpora to be
trained on classification tasks. The variation in image resolutions, sizes of
objects and patterns depicted, and image scales, hampers CNN training and
performance, because the task-relevant information varies over spatial scales.
Previous work attempting to deal with such scale variations focused on
encouraging scale-invariant CNN representations. However, scale-invariant
representations are incomplete representations of images, because images
contain scale-variant information as well. This paper addresses the combined
development of scale-invariant and scale-variant representations. We propose a
multi- scale CNN method to encourage the recognition of both types of features
and evaluate it on a challenging image classification task involving
task-relevant characteristics at multiple scales. The results show that our
multi-scale CNN outperforms single-scale CNN. This leads to the conclusion that
encouraging the combined development of a scale-invariant and scale-variant
representation in CNNs is beneficial to image recognition performance
Extended-Linking Services: towards a Quality Web
A URL takes requesters from a citation to a destination⊠provided, of course, the URL is still valid. The current chaotic web is wonderful in its way. However, within this chaotic web, we believe there is a need for a high-quality web of vetted information. The emerging OpenURL standard is the cornerstone of a worldwide web with high-quality links that feature properties such as:
âąPersistence: Increase the probable lifetime of citations.
âąMultiplicity: Produce a menu of targeted services for each citation.
âąContext-Sensitivity: Resolve a citation in a manner appropriate to the user and to the context.
To encourage the development of extended-linking services, NISO formed a committee to develop a standard OpenURL syntax. Our immediate goal is to serve the scholarly-information community immediately. However, the OpenURL technique is widely applicable, and we expect to serve many other information communities
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