Policy Priorities of Municipal Candidates in the 2014 Local Ontario Elections

This paper reports the results of a survey on the policy priorities of municipal candidates in the 2014 municipal elections in Ontario. As part of a survey of municipal candidates in 47 Ontario municipalities, we asked a series of questions relating to perceived policy priorities, election issues, and electoral success to shed light on the extent to which municipal political candidates are “policy seekers,” and the extent to which their policy priorities vary across municipalities and municipal types, successful and unsuccessful candidates, and urban and rural candidates. We find that reported policy priorities tend to fall into two major categories: fiscal issues and economic development or administration and good governance. The prominence of these fiscal and procedural priorities is steady across a range of local candidate types, including successful and unsuccessful candidates, incumbent and non-incumbent candidates, and even urban and rural candidates. Only in very large municipalities, according to our findings, does the structure of candidate priorities begin to diverge from this standard emphasis on finance and procedure

Weighting NTBEA for Game AI Optimisation

The N-Tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm (NTBEA) has proven very effective in optimising algorithm parameters in Game AI. A potential weakness is the use of a simple average of all component Tuples in the model. This study investigates a refinement to the N-Tuple model used in NTBEA by weighting these component Tuples by their level of information and specificity of match. We introduce weighting functions to the model to obtain Weighted- NTBEA and test this on four benchmark functions and two game environments. These tests show that vanilla NTBEA is the most reliable and performant of the algorithms tested. Furthermore we show that given an iteration budget it is better to execute several independent NTBEA runs, and use part of the budget to find the best recommendation from these runs

Visualising Multiplayer Game Spaces

We investigate four different sets of statistics as ‘game-spaces’ in which to embed 2, 3 and 4 player modern board-games, and show how each can provide distinct insight. Using statistics gained from multiple optimisation runs of MCTS parameters creates a game-space that is particularly interpretable to show what algorithmic settings work well for different games. Using classic game-tree attributes to define a game-space does not correlate with these findings. For each game-space we visualise the distribution of games and ask if there are differences as the number of players, or opponent type, varies. We find this does occur for some games in the sample set. Visualising games using the different sets of statistics can help understand their commonalities and differences, but can hide the detail of a specific game's response to changing player count. A more detailed game ‘fingerprint’ using the statistics based on optimised MCTS parameters is better at distinguishing which games exhibit significant changes with player count or opponent

Fingerprinting Tabletop Games

We present some initial work on characterizing games using a visual 'fingerprint' generated from several independent optimisation runs over the parameters used in Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). This 'fingerprint' provides a useful tool to compare games, as well as highlighting the relative sensitivity of a specific game to algorithmic variants of MCTS. The exploratory work presented here shows that in some games there is a major change in the optimal MCTS parameters when we move from 2-players to 3 or 4-players

A case study in AI-assisted board game design

We use AI agents to play successive design iterations of an analogue board game to understand the sorts of question a designer asks of a game, and how AI play-testing approaches can help answer these questions and reduce the need for time-consuming human play-testing. Our case study supports the view that AI play-testing can complement human testing, but can certainly not replace it. A core issue to be addressed is the extent to which the designer trusts the results of AI play-testing as sufficiently human-like. The majority of design changes are inspired from human play-testing, but AI play-testing helpfully complements these and often gave the designer the confidence to make changes faster where AI and humans 'agreed'

Essays on Unintended Effects of Government Policies

Public finance economics is often concerned with the "unintended consequences" of government policies, as an evaluation of these unintended effects is required to obtain a complete picture of the efficacy of a given policy. In my dissertation, I study three government policies, along with their potential unintended effects. I find that, in general, the potential unintended effects that I study are economically small. These findings suggest that policymakers in these areas can focus relatively more on the direct, intended effects of these policies when evaluating their costs and benefits. In the first chapter, I study an expansion of Medicaid which occurred in 2014 as part of the Affordable Care Act. Because this expansion was only taken up by approximately half of all U.S. states, migration across state lines is a potential unintended consequence of these reforms. I analyze data from the American Community Survey and find that this migration response was not large: I estimate that migration could have increased Medicaid rolls in expansion states by no more than 2 percent. In the second chapter, Chris Boone, Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and I study extensions of unemployment insurance (UI) in the U.S. during the Great Recession. The "moral hazard" effect of UI on individual search effort has been well-studied. In this chapter, we broaden these potential unintended effects to include all potential effects (positive and negative) on aggregate employment at the county level. Again, we find little effect: we can rule out negative effects of the extensions in excess of -0.3 percentage points of the employment-to-population ratio. Finally, in the third chapter, I use administrative tax data to study a tax reform in the state of Kansas which was designed to provide tax relief to businesses. This reform also increased an incentive for owners of a subset of these businesses to reclassify wage income as the profits of the firm -- potentially reducing tax revenue. I again find that the effect was small. I show theoretically why this increase in incentive may not have caused a large response, even if the introduction of the incentive caused a much bigger response

Why Delannoy numbers?

This article is not a research paper, but a little note on the history of combinatorics: We present here a tentative short biography of Henri Delannoy, and a survey of his most notable works. This answers to the question raised in the title, as these works are related to lattice paths enumeration, to the so-called Delannoy numbers, and were the first general way to solve Ballot-like problems. These numbers appear in probabilistic game theory, alignments of DNA sequences, tiling problems, temporal representation models, analysis of algorithms and combinatorial structures.Comment: Presented to the conference "Lattice Paths Combinatorics and Discrete Distributions" (Athens, June 5-7, 2002) and to appear in the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference

Willingness-to-Pay for New Products in a University Foodservice Setting

A dairy products manufacturer wishing to expand into university foodservice operations collaborated with a graduate marketing class to research student preferences regarding the Company’s products. Baseline and follow-up stated choice surveys and conditional logit analyses were conducted at a land-grant university where the Company’s products were introduced. Brand awareness grew but remained low during the study period. Average WTP estimates for the Company’s most popular product approximated the retail price and resembled WTP for a competing brand. Average WTP for the Company’s other products, however, was considerably lower than the retail price. Significant WTP differences existed among some consumer segments.Willingness-to-Pay, Consumer Segment, University Foodservice, Conjoint analysis, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,