Dense Stellar Populations: Initial Conditions

This chapter is based on four lectures given at the Cambridge N-body school "Cambody". The material covered includes the IMF, the 6D structure of dense clusters, residual gas expulsion and the initial binary population. It is aimed at those needing to initialise stellar populations for a variety of purposes (N-body experiments, stellar population synthesis).Comment: 85 pages. To appear in The Cambridge N-body Lectures, Sverre Aarseth, Christopher Tout, Rosemary Mardling (eds), Lecture Notes in Physics Series, Springer Verla

Cognitive Preference Reversal or Market Price Reversal?

Preference Reversal Phenomenon (PRP) has been most often scrutinized as a puzzle of 'preferences', while the discovery of the 'endowment effect' explicitly questions the parity between preference and price. The author's experiment (N = 186) connects these two extraordinary findings and illustrates that PRP is only a reversal of price in a 'market.' PRP merely proves that subjects demand to be compensated based on loss under market access deprivation when a 'maximum buying'/'minimum selling' price is elicited, and preference transitivity is restored once the misleading market manipulation is experimentally controlled. Copyright 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

Violations of transitivity under fitness maximization

We present a novel demonstration that violations of transitive choice can result from decision strategies that maximize fitness. Our results depend on how the available options, including options not currently chosen, influence a decision-maker's expectations about the future. In particular, they depend on how the presence of an option may act as an insurance against a run of bad luck in the future

Modeling Spatial Variation in Housing Prices: A Variable Interaction Approach

The absolute location of each real estate parcel in an urban housing market has a unique location-value signature. Accessibility indices, distant gradients and locational dummies cannot fully account for the influence of absolute location on the market price of housing because there are an indeterminable number of externalities (local and nonlocal) influencing a given property at a given location. Furthermore, the degree to which externalities affect real estate values is not only unique at each location but highly variable over space. Hence, absolute location must be viewed as interactive with other determinants of housing value. We present an interactive variables approach and test its ability to explain price variations in an urban residential housing market. The statistical evidence suggests that the value of location, as embodied in the selling price of housing units, may not be separable from other determinants of value. It is recommended that housing valuation models, therefore, be specified to allow site, structural and other independent attributes to interact with absolute location-{x, y} coordinates-when accounting for intraurban variation in the market price of residential housing. This approach is especially useful when estimating the value of housing for geographic areas where very little is known a priori about the neighborhoods or submarkets. Copyright 2003 by the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association

Hierarchical Zoning, Incompatible Uses and Price Discounts

This study examines an aspect of hierarchical zoning. Hierarchical zoning, unlike mutually exclusive zoning, is uni-directional in that it protects upper-level residential uses from nonconforming, non-residential uses but not "vice versa." The result is that the lower-level zones can be a mixture of several nonconforming, incompatible uses. This unique attribute of hierarchical zoning offers a window of opportunity for choices for affordable housing at affordable locations. Using hedonic analysis, empirical evidence shows that huge price discounts (over 15%) are associated with apartments that are situated in nonconforming zones. Arguments here support more flexible zoning. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.