Towards a Philosophy of the Mobile Information Society

This introductory section of my present paper is a kind of report on the ongoing social science research programme I am directing: the project “Communications in the 21st Century”, launched in January 2001, conducted jointly by T-Mobile Hungary (until 2004 Westel Mobile) and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In the framework of the project a number of international conferences were held, on the basis of which altogether eleven volumes—four Hungarian, one German, and six English—have been published. I will first give a very brief summary of these volumes, and then provide a more detailed description of some of the main results we arrived at. The eleven volumes are witness to the history of the mobile phone between 2001 and 2007, no doubt the most dynamic aspect of the recent history of technological and social transformation. But most of all they amount to a first laying of the foundations for, and at the same time the awakening to consciousness and self-reflection of, a young discipline: the social science of mobile communication. Initially, research on problems pertaining to the mobile arose as an interdisciplinary task. From the interdisciplinary research, each of the participating disciplines pro?ted, being forced to take account, on the level of theory, of the new medium which by now has come to constitute their main communicational environment. As a consequence of this taking account of the new realities, by 2005 a transformation was occurring which today has clearly become irreversible: the internal adaptation of the social sciences to the world of mobile communications. At the same time, an autonomous line of research emerged, based on a set of wellestablished paradigms of its own: the social science of mobile communication, Mobile Studies. Both aspects of this juncture in the history of science are represented in Nyíri (2007a, 2007b), which on the one hand takes stock of the paradigmatic results of mobile studies, and on the other hand highlights some new perspectives of the social sciences becoming aware of their mobile environment

Neural Networks in Bankruptcy Prediction - A Comparative Study on the Basis of the First Hungarian Bankruptcy Model

The article attempts to answer the question whether or not the latest bankruptcy prediction techniques are more reliable than traditional mathematical–statistical ones in Hungary. Simulation experiments carried out on the database of the first Hungarian bankruptcy prediction model clearly prove that bankruptcy models built using artificial neural networks have higher classification accuracy than models created in the 1990s based on discriminant analysis and logistic regression analysis. The article presents the main results, analyses the reasons for the differences and presents constructive proposals concerning the further development of Hungarian bankruptcy prediction

Screening with an Approximate Type Space

We re-visit the single-agent mechanism design problem with quasi-linear preferences, but we assume that the principal knowingly operates on the basis of only an approximate type space rather than the (potentially complex) truth. We propose a two-step scheme, the profit-participation mechanism, whereby: (i) the principal .takes the model seriously and computes the optimal menu for the approximate type space; (ii) but she discounts the price of each allocation proportionally to the profit that the allocation would yield in the approximate model. We characterize the bound to the profit loss and show that it vanishes smoothly as the distance between the approximate type space and the true type space converges to zero. Instead, we show that it is not a valid approximation to simply act as if the model was correct.

Statistical inference for 2-type doubly symmetric critical irreducible continuous state and continuous time branching processes with immigration

We study asymptotic behavior of conditional least squares estimators for 2-type doubly symmetric critical irreducible continuous state and continuous time branching processes with immigration based on discrete time (low frequency) observations.Comment: 67 pages. Estimation of a new parameter is added. In Section 2 we recall some notions and statements from arXiv:1403.0245 and arXiv:1404.224