Fragility of the Commons under Prospect-Theoretic Risk Attitudes

We study a common-pool resource game where the resource experiences failure with a probability that grows with the aggregate investment in the resource. To capture decision making under such uncertainty, we model each player's risk preference according to the value function from prospect theory. We show the existence and uniqueness of a pure Nash equilibrium when the players have heterogeneous risk preferences and under certain assumptions on the rate of return and failure probability of the resource. Greater competition, vis-a-vis the number of players, increases the failure probability at the Nash equilibrium; we quantify this effect by obtaining bounds on the ratio of the failure probability at the Nash equilibrium to the failure probability under investment by a single user. We further show that heterogeneity in attitudes towards loss aversion leads to higher failure probability of the resource at the equilibrium.Comment: Accepted for publication in Games and Economic Behavior, 201

Distortion Sensitive Algorithm to Preserve Line Structure Properties in Image Resampling

In order to remove less important content from image seam carving algorithm is used. In seam carving distortion is very low as compared to other techniques like scaling and cropping. The major drawback of seam carving is when seam intersects with straight line present in the image it distorts line structure; the line may become curve after distortion. This structure distortion not only degrades visual quality of image but also gives artifacts or aliased line structure. This paper presents a content aware seam carving algorithm to resize the image. After applying algorithm discussed the structure of regular objects present in the image can be preserved. In the proposed algorithm first line detection algorithm is applied over the image in order to detect possible straight lines present in the image. After detecting straight lines algorithm tries to find out intersection point of optimal seam with the straight line. Algorithm increases energy of local neighbourhood pixels of intersection point up to a predefined radius, so that no further seam can intersect same pixel again