7,811 research outputs found
Damaged Goods: A resource depletion model of addictive consumption
Economic research on the consumption of harmful goods focuses principally on the addictive nature of consumption rather than its impacts on health, despite medical research showing that consumers primarily consider health effects when making decisions about addictive behaviour. In this paper, the standard rational addiction model is recast in terms of a resource depletion problem, where the resource in question is a depletable stock of health, and the time horizon is finite. Analysis of the prototype health depletion model finds two types of consumption path, one that is compatible with the results from rational addiction and one that is not. Several extensions to the prototype model are explored.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,
The Effect of Cigarette Excise Taxes on Smoking Before, During and After Pregnancy
Recent analyses suggest that cigarette excise taxes lower prenatal smoking. It is unclear, however, whether the association between taxes and prenatal smoking represents a decline among women of reproductive age or a particular response by pregnant women. We address this question directly with an analysis of quit and relapse behavior during and after pregnancy. We find that the price elasticity of prenatal quitting and postpartum relapse is close to one in absolute value. We conclude that direct financial incentives to stop smoking during and after pregnancy should be considered.
Achieving Extreme Resolution in Numerical Cosmology Using Adaptive Mesh Refinement: Resolving Primordial Star Formation
As an entry for the 2001 Gordon Bell Award in the "special" category, we
describe our 3-d, hybrid, adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code, Enzo, designed
for high-resolution, multiphysics, cosmological structure formation
simulations. Our parallel implementation places no limit on the depth or
complexity of the adaptive grid hierarchy, allowing us to achieve unprecedented
spatial and temporal dynamic range. We report on a simulation of primordial
star formation which develops over 8000 subgrids at 34 levels of refinement to
achieve a local refinement of a factor of 10^12 in space and time. This allows
us to resolve the properties of the first stars which form in the universe
assuming standard physics and a standard cosmological model. Achieving extreme
resolution requires the use of 128-bit extended precision arithmetic (EPA) to
accurately specify the subgrid positions. We describe our EPA AMR
implementation on the IBM SP2 Blue Horizon system at the San Diego
Supercomputer Center.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures. Peer reviewed technical paper accepted to the
proceedings of Supercomputing 2001. This entry was a Gordon Bell Prize
finalist. For more information visit http://www.TomAbel.com/GB
Alternating sign matrices and domino tilings
We introduce a family of planar regions, called Aztec diamonds, and study the
ways in which these regions can be tiled by dominoes. Our main result is a
generating function that not only gives the number of domino tilings of the
Aztec diamond of order but also provides information about the orientation
of the dominoes (vertical versus horizontal) and the accessibility of one
tiling from another by means of local modifications. Several proofs of the
formula are given. The problem turns out to have connections with the
alternating sign matrices of Mills, Robbins, and Rumsey, as well as the square
ice model studied by Lieb
- âŠ