Truthful approximations to range voting

We consider the fundamental mechanism design problem of approximate social welfare maximization under general cardinal preferences on a finite number of alternatives and without money. The well-known range voting scheme can be thought of as a non-truthful mechanism for exact social welfare maximization in this setting. With m being the number of alternatives, we exhibit a randomized truthful-in-expectation ordinal mechanism implementing an outcome whose expected social welfare is at least an Omega(m^{-3/4}) fraction of the social welfare of the socially optimal alternative. On the other hand, we show that for sufficiently many agents and any truthful-in-expectation ordinal mechanism, there is a valuation profile where the mechanism achieves at most an O(m^{-{2/3}) fraction of the optimal social welfare in expectation. We get tighter bounds for the natural special case of m = 3, and in that case furthermore obtain separation results concerning the approximation ratios achievable by natural restricted classes of truthful-in-expectation mechanisms. In particular, we show that for m = 3 and a sufficiently large number of agents, the best mechanism that is ordinal as well as mixed-unilateral has an approximation ratio between 0.610 and 0.611, the best ordinal mechanism has an approximation ratio between 0.616 and 0.641, while the best mixed-unilateral mechanism has an approximation ratio bigger than 0.660. In particular, the best mixed-unilateral non-ordinal (i.e., cardinal) mechanism strictly outperforms all ordinal ones, even the non-mixed-unilateral ordinal ones

R&D Investments with Competitive Interactions

In this article we develop a model to analyze patent-protected R&D investment projects when there is (imperfect) competition in the development and marketing of the resulting product. The competitive interactions that occur substantially complicate the solution of the problem since the decision maker has to take into account not only the factors that affect her/his own decisions, but also the factors that affect the decisions of the other investors. The real options framework utilized to deal with investments under uncertainty is extended to incorporate the game theoretic concepts required to deal with these interactions. Implementation of the model shows that competition in R&D, in general, not only increases production and reduces prices, but also shortens the time of developing the product and increases the probability of a successful development. These benefits to society are countered by increased total investment costs in R&D and lower aggregate value of the R&D investment projects.

Nounself pronouns: 3rd person personal pronouns as identity expression

This paper is an examination of and attempt at a preliminary definition of nounself pronouns, which are a large number of newly invented English 3rd person personal pronouns that have not been previously studied. The pronouns are created and used primarily by a virtual community on the blogging platform tumblr.com, with the first occurrence of a nounself pronoun in late 2013. The study is based on data from 134 responses to a questionnaire written by the author, distributed through tumblr.com, as well as on email-based interviews with three respondents who volunteered to be interviewed.  Analysis of the data suggests that the pronouns are used to express, explore, and negotiate the identities of the respondents, in particular in relation to gender identities

On-Line Reevaluation of Functions

Given a finite set S and a function f : S^n -> S^m, we consider the problem of making a data structure which maintains a value of x in S^n and allows us to efficiently change an arbitrary coordinate of x and efficiently evaluate f_i(x) for arbitrary i. We both examine the problem for specific choices of f and relate the possibility of an efficient solution to general properties of f: expressibility as a formula, space complexity and time complexity

De, den, hen, and the rest: A pilot study of the use of gender-neutral and nonbinary/genderqueer pronouns in Danish

The Danish language, like many other ‘Western’ languages, does not have any human-referent gender neutral third person singular pronoun that is “officially” recognized in the sense that it is taught in language classes, used in public documents, or included in most dictionaries. Nevertheless, many individuals prefer being referred to with pronouns that do not designate that individual as either female or male, which prompts linguistic innovation and creativity. This article is a pilot study presenting the initial results of a 7-question survey investigating the use of gender neutral and nonbinary/genderqueer pronouns in Danish. Based on 75 responses, it is found that the pronouns most people prefer others to refer to them with are de ‘they’ (the third person plural), den ‘it’ (the third person singular common gender, conventionally used to refer to objects and non-pet animals), and hen (third person singular neologism), as well as hun ‘she’ and han ‘he’. The survey targeted two groups of respondents: 1) Nonbinary/genderqueer individuals and 2) Women and men who wish to be referred to with pronouns other than hun/han. The final section of the article suggests several topics for further research of gender neutral and nonbinary/genderqueer pronouns, both in Danish and in other languages

On Data Structures and Asymmetric Communication Complexity

In this paper we consider two party communication complexity when the input sizes of the two players differ significantly, the ``asymmetric'' case. Most of previous work on communication complexity only considers the total number of bits sent, but we study tradeoffs between the number of bits the first player sends and the number of bits the second sends. These types of questions are closely related to the complexity of static data structure problems in the cell probe model. We derive two generally applicable methods of proving lower bounds, and obtain several applications. These applications include new lower bounds for data structures in the cell probe model. Of particular interest is our ``round elimination'' lemma, which is interesting also for the usual symmetric communication case. This lemma generalizes and abstracts in a very clean form the ``round reduction'' techniques used in many previous lower bound proofs