17,832 research outputs found
The Review - Fall 2001
IN THIS ISSUE
1 - Message From The Dean
2 - A Special Welcome for Alumni Babies
2 - A Very Special Offer for Our Alumni
3 - Farewell to Joann Ludwig
4 - The Admissions-Alumni Partnership
5 - JAVA is Brewing at Jefferson!
6 - What A Year!
8 - Alumni Update
10 - Alumni News Form
11 - Visiting Scholar 2001: A Nurse Alumna Sets the Agenda
12 - Michael Hartman Elected New CHP Alumni President
13 - Commencement 200
Two-Party Competition with Persistent Policies
This paper studies the Markov perfect equilibrium outcomes of a dynamic game of electoral competition between two policy-motivated parties. I model incumbent policy persistence: parties commit to implement a policy for their full tenure in office, and hence in any election only the opposition party renews its platform. In equilibrium, parties alternate in power and policies converge to symmetric alternations about the median voter's ideal policy. Parties' disutility from opponents' policies leads to alterna- tions that display bounded extremism; alternations far from the median are never limits of equilibrium dynamics. Under a natural restriction on strategies, I find that robust long-run outcomes display bounded moderation; alternations close to the median are reached in equilibrium only if policy dynamics start there. I show that these results are robust to voters being forward-looking, the introduction of term limits, costly policy adjustments for incumbents, and office benefits.
Keeping Your Options Open
In standard models of experimentation, the costs of project development consist of (i) the direct cost of running trials as well as (ii) the implicit opportunity cost of leaving alternative projects idle. Another natural type of experimentation cost, the cost of holding on to the option of developing a currently inactive project, has not been studied. In a (multi-armed bandit) model of experimentation in which inactive projects have explicit maintenance costs and can be irreversibly discarded, I fully characterise the optimal experimentation policy and show that the decision-maker's incentive to actively manage its options has important implications for the order of project development. In the model, an experimenter searches for a success among a number of projects by choosing both those to develop now and those to maintain for (potential) future development. In the absence of maintenance costs, the optimal experimentation policy has a 'stay-with-the-winner' property: the projects that are more likely to succeed are developed first. Maintenance costs provide incentives to bring the option value of less promising projects forward, and under the optimal experimentation policy, projects that are less likely to succeed are sometimes developed first. A project development strategy of 'going-with-the-loser' strikes a balance between the cost of discarding possibly valuable options and the cost of leaving them open.
Upward-closed hereditary families in the dominance order
The majorization relation orders the degree sequences of simple graphs into
posets called dominance orders. As shown by Hammer et al. and Merris, the
degree sequences of threshold and split graphs form upward-closed sets within
the dominance orders they belong to, i.e., any degree sequence majorizing a
split or threshold sequence must itself be split or threshold, respectively.
Motivated by the fact that threshold graphs and split graphs have
characterizations in terms of forbidden induced subgraphs, we define a class
of graphs to be dominance monotone if whenever no realization of
contains an element as an induced subgraph, and majorizes
, then no realization of induces an element of . We present
conditions necessary for a set of graphs to be dominance monotone, and we
identify the dominance monotone sets of order at most 3.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure
Sequential products in effect categories
A new categorical framework is provided for dealing with multiple arguments
in a programming language with effects, for example in a language with
imperative features. Like related frameworks (Monads, Arrows, Freyd
categories), we distinguish two kinds of functions. In addition, we also
distinguish two kinds of equations. Then, we are able to define a kind of
product, that generalizes the usual categorical product. This yields a powerful
tool for deriving many results about languages with effects
Symmetric indefinite triangular factorization revealing the rank profile matrix
We present a novel recursive algorithm for reducing a symmetric matrix to a
triangular factorization which reveals the rank profile matrix. That is, the
algorithm computes a factorization where is a permutation matrix,
is lower triangular with a unit diagonal and is
symmetric block diagonal with and antidiagonal
blocks. The novel algorithm requires arithmetic
operations. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm
can even be slightly more than twice as fast as the state of the art
unsymmetric Gaussian elimination in most cases, that is it achieves
approximately the same computational speed. By adapting the pivoting strategy
developed in the unsymmetric case, we show how to recover the rank profile
matrix from the permutation matrix and the support of the block-diagonal
matrix. There is an obstruction in characteristic for revealing the rank
profile matrix which requires to relax the shape of the block diagonal by
allowing the 2-dimensional blocks to have a non-zero bottom-right coefficient.
This relaxed decomposition can then be transformed into a standard
decomposition at a
negligible cost
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