Cognitive Dissonance and Choice

People like to feel good about past decisions. This paper models self- justification of past decisions. The model is axiomatic: axioms are defined on preference over ex ante actions (modeled formally by menus) The representation of preference admits the interpretation that the agent adjusts beliefs after taking an action so as to be more optimistic about its possible consequences. In particular, the ex post choice of beliefs is part of the representation of preference and not a primitive assumption. Behavioral characterizations are given to the comparisons "1 exhibits more dissonance than 2" and "1 is more self-justifying than 2."cognitive dissonance, optimism, temptation, self-control, self-justification, choice-theoretic, choosing beliefs

Cold feet

Individuals often lose confidence in their prospects as they approach the `moment of truth.' An axiomatic model of such individuals is provided. The model adapts and extends (by relaxing the Independence axiom) Gul and Pesendorfer's model of temptation and self-control to capture an individual who changes her beliefs so as to become more pessimistic as payoff time approaches. In a variation of the model, the individual becomes more optimistic at an ex post stage in order to feel better about her available options.Pessimism, optimism, cold feet, temptation, self-control, moment of truth, temporal proximity, confidence

An axiomatic model of 'cold feet'

Individuals often lose confidence in their prospects as they approach the "moment of truth." An axiomatic model of such individuals is provided. The model adapts and extends (by relaxing the Independence axiom) Gul and Pesendorfer's model of temptation and self-control to capture an individual who changes her beliefs so as to become more pessimistic as payoff time approaches. In a variation of the model, the individual becomes more optimistic at an ex post stage in order to feel better about her available options.pessimism, optimism, cold feet, temptation, self-control, moment of truth, temporal proximity, confidence

Estimating Accuracy of Experimentally Obtained Power System Zip Load Models

Experimentally obtained ZIP load models are used for the power system analysis. Estimating accuracy of such models is presented in this paper. The dependence of ZIP load model error on the range in which voltage changes during the experiment, the number of measured values of voltage and power, standard deviation of the load change random process have been obtained using the computing experiment. The results could be used to estimate the accuracy of ZIP load models or to design the experiment to determine ZIP load models with prescribed accuracy

System for identifying and reporting changes to course websites

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-64).CourseDiff is a prototype system that periodically samples course websites and notifies users via email when it identifies changes to those sites. The system was developed after conducting a study of 120 web pages from 50 MIT course websites sampled for two months during the spring semester of 2009. The study found that only 18% of changes to the HTML content of course website data are actually important to the content of the page. A closer examination of the corpus identified two major sources of trivial changes. The first is automatically generated content that changes on every visit to the page. The second is formatting and whitespace changes that do not affect the page's textual content. Together, these two sources produce over 99% of the trivial changes. CourseDiff implements an algorithm to filter out these trivial changes from the webpages it samples and a change reporting format for the changes that are identified as important. A small user test on part of the CourseDiff interface indicated that the system could feasibly be used by students to track changes to course websites.by Igor Kopylov.M.Eng

Precision measurements of the top quark mass from the Tevatron in the pre-LHC era

The top quark is the heaviest of the six quarks of the Standard Model. Precise knowledge of its mass is important for imposing constraints on a number of physics processes, including interactions of the as yet unobserved Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the only missing particle of the Standard Model, central to the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism and generation of particle masses. In this Review, experimental measurements of the top quark mass accomplished at the Tevatron, a proton-antiproton collider located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, are described. Topologies of top quark events and methods used to separate signal events from background sources are discussed. Data analysis techniques used to extract information about the top mass value are reviewed. The combination of several most precise measurements performed with the two Tevatron particle detectors, CDF and \D0, yields a value of \Mt = 173.2 \pm 0.9 GeV/$c^2$.Comment: This version contains the most up-to-date top quark mass averag