Do Quasi-Hyperbolic Preferences Explain Academic Procrastination? An Empirical Evaluation

Traditional neoclassical thought fails to explain questions such as problems of self-control. Behavioural economics have explained these matters on the basis of the intertemporal preferences of individuals and, specifically, the so-called (β, δ) model which emphasises present bias. This opens the way to the analysis of new situations in which people can adopt incorrect indecisions that make it necessary for the government to intervene. The literature which has developed the (β, δ) model and its implications has generated a categorisation of people that is widely used but which lacks a systematic empirical evaluation. It is important to value the need for this public action. In this article, we develop a method which makes it possible to verify the main implications that this model has to explain the procrastination of university students. Using an experimental time discount task with real monetary incentives, we estimate the students’ β and δ parameters and we analyse their correlation with their answers to a series of questions concerning how they plan to study for an exam. The results are ambiguous given that they back some of the model’s conclusions but reject others, including a number of the most basic ones, such as the relation between present biases and some of the categories of people, these being essential to predict their behaviour

2 districs, 2 plans, 2 bets: recovery of marginal neighborhoods in Barcelona

Los Planes Especiales de Reforma Interior formulados para los barrios de Sant Josep en Sant Viçens dels Horts y Torre Baró en Barcelona, representan dos maneras de abordar la mejora de un barrio de urbanización marginal. Treinta años después de su formulación, compararlos y evaluar su impacto real permite extraer conclusiones sobre la postura que tomaron y la metodología que emplearon. Hoy la marginalidad urbanística sigue siendo un tema no sólo vigente sino incluso urgente en países en vía de desarrollo, por lo que poder disponer referencias contrastables sobre la aplicación de determinadas estrategias puede ser de gran utilidad.The Special Internal Reformation Plans that were drawn up for Sant Josep, Sant Viçens dels Horts and Torre Baró, Barcelona, represent two different ways to approach a marginal urbanization neighborhood. However, the fact that both of them were approved and their execution was started in the 80’s decade allows evaluating today, 30 years later, their impact on each neighborhood. Moreover, it also allows inferring conclusions regarding the methodology used, and the stance taken on such neighborhoods. Thus, it represents a possibility of major importance if it considered that, to date, there is scarce literature related to this matter, and that marginality still is not only a prevailing subject, but an urgent issue in developing countriesPeer Reviewe

SMoT+NCS: Algorithm for Detecting Non-Continuous Stops

Several algorithms have been proposed in the last years for discovering stops in trajectories of moving objects. Some methods consider as stops the subtrajectories that i) have speed lower than the average trajectory speed, ii) present significant direction changes, iii) have gaps, or iv) intersect a given spatial region. In these approaches a time constraint should be met for the subtrajectory to be considered as a stop, and this constraint is absolute (it is met or not). Indeed, these approaches consider stops as a continuous subtrajectory. In this paper, we show that for several application domains the stops do not need to be continuous, and the time constraint should be relaxed. In summary, we present the definitions of non-continuous stops and present an algorithm to discover a new kind of stops. We evaluate the proposed algorithm with a running example and real trajectory data, comparing it to the most similar approach in the literature, the SMoT algorithm

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