10,924 research outputs found
Privatization and Liberalization and the Transition To A Market Economy: The Former Soviet Union
International Relations/Trade,
On the resurgent population and food debate
Since Malthus wrote his famous Essay on Population, the world has witnessed great improvements in numerous measures of well-being Ă life expectancy, infant mortality, incidence of famines and plagues, per capita food consumption as well as real per capita incomes. These improvements have come about during rapid population growth in both industrial and developing countries. Food demand and supply projections suggest that growth of supply will fully meet growth of consumption while grain prices continue to decline. While China may increase grain imports early next century, Central and Eastern Europe is likely to emerge as a major grain exporter and thus help to meet the increase in China's imports.Food Security and Poverty,
Consistency and heterogeneity of individual behavior under uncertainty
By using graphical representations of simple portfolio choice problems,
we generate a very rich data set to study behavior under uncertainty
at the level of the individual subject. We test the data for
consistency with the maximization hypothesis, and we estimate preferences
using a two-parameter utility function based on Faruk Gul
(1991). This specification provides a good interpretation of the data
at the individual level and can account for the highly heterogeneous
behaviors observed in the laboratory. The parameter estimates jointly
describe attitudes toward risk and allow us to characterize the distribution
of risk preferences in the population
Molecular dynamics simulations of the interactions of potential foulant molecules and a reverse osmosis membrane
Reverse osmosis (RO) is increasingly one of the most common technologies for desalination worldwide. However, fouling of the membranes used in the RO process remains one of the main challenges. In order to better understand the molecular basis of fouling the interactions of a fully atomistic model of a polyamide membrane with three different foulant molecules, oxygen gas, glucose and phenol, are investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. In addition to unbiased simulations, umbrella sampling methods have been used to calculate the free energy profiles of the membrane-foulant interactions. The results show that each of the three foulants interacts with the membrane in a different manner.It is found that a build up of the two organic foulants, glucose and phenol, occurs at the membrane-saline solution, due to the favourable nature of the interaction in this region, and that the presence of these foulants reduces the rate of flow of water molecules over the membrane-solution interface. However, analysis of the hydrogen bonding shows that the origin of attraction of the foulant for the membrane differs. In the case of oxygen gas the simulations show that a build up of gas within the membrane is likely, although, no deterioration in the membrane performance was observed
Sequential equilibrium in monotone games: theory-based analysis of experimental data
A monotone game is an extensive-form game with complete information,
simultaneous moves and an irreversibility structure on strategies.
It captures a variety of situations in which players make partial
commitments and allows us to characterize conditions under which
equilibria result in socially desirable outcomes. However, since the
game has many equilibrium outcomes, the theory lacks predictive power.
To produce stronger predictions, one can restrict attention to the set of
sequential equilibria, or Markov equilibria, or symmetric equilibria, or
pure-strategy equilibria. This paper explores the relationship between
equilibrium behavior in a class of monotone games, namely voluntary contribution games, and the behavior of human subjects in an experimental
setting. We find evidence of both pure- and mixed-strategy
equilibria and several key features of the symmetric Markov perfect
equilibrium (SMPE) in the data. To judge how well the SMPE fits the
data, we estimate a model of Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE)
(McKelvey and Palfrey 1995, 1998) and find that the decision rules of
the QRE model are qualitatively very similar to the empirical choice
probabilities
Local search for stable marriage problems with ties and incomplete lists
The stable marriage problem has a wide variety of practical applications,
ranging from matching resident doctors to hospitals, to matching students to
schools, or more generally to any two-sided market. We consider a useful
variation of the stable marriage problem, where the men and women express their
preferences using a preference list with ties over a subset of the members of
the other sex. Matchings are permitted only with people who appear in these
preference lists. In this setting, we study the problem of finding a stable
matching that marries as many people as possible. Stability is an envy-free
notion: no man and woman who are not married to each other would both prefer
each other to their partners or to being single. This problem is NP-hard. We
tackle this problem using local search, exploiting properties of the problem to
reduce the size of the neighborhood and to make local moves efficiently.
Experimental results show that this approach is able to solve large problems,
quickly returning stable matchings of large and often optimal size.Comment: 12 pages, Proc. PRICAI 2010 (11th Pacific Rim International
Conference on Artificial Intelligence), Byoung-Tak Zhang and Mehmet A. Orgun
eds., Springer LNA
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