Bayesian Modeling of Consumer Behavior in the Presence of Anonymous Visits

Tailoring content to consumers has become a hallmark of marketing and digital media, particularly as it has become easier to identify customers across usage or purchase occasions. However, across a wide variety of contexts, companies find that customers do not consistently identify themselves, leaving a substantial fraction of anonymous visits. We develop a Bayesian hierarchical model that allows us to probabilistically assign anonymous sessions to users. These probabilistic assignments take into account a customer\u27s demographic information, frequency of visitation, activities taken when visiting, and times of arrival. We present two studies, one with synthetic and one with real data, where we demonstrate improved performance over two popular practices (nearest-neighbor matching and deleting the anonymous visits) due to increased efficiency and reduced bias driven by the non-ignorability of which types of events are more likely to be anonymous. Using our proposed model, we avoid potential bias in understanding the effect of a firm\u27s marketing on its customers, improve inference about the total number of customers in the dataset, and provide more precise targeted marketing to both previously observed and unobserved customers

2014 IPA economic freedom index

This paper presents estimates for economic freedom rankings of the six Australian states. Introduction Economic freedom, or the ability of individuals to justly and non-coercively acquire, use and dispose of property as they each see fit, has long represented an animating principle of Western societies. The experience of history, and not to mention empirical studies, affirm the notion that greater levels of economic freedom tend to be associated with increasing economic prosperity and improved social wellbeing. Despite these benefits, governments have long engaged in activities to restrict economic freedom through excessive taxation, public spending and debt which misallocate scarce resources; providing social security benefits which quell incentives to work and save in the productive sector; and imposing regulatory burdens restricting the exercise of entrepreneurship by private sector economic agents. Australian governments at all levels interfere with our economic freedoms on a daily basis. In the absence of information it is difficult for taxpayers and citizens to determine which government is imposing policies more egregious to maintaining economic freedom, and the detrimental flow-on effects for long term economic and social improvements. There is a need to fill in this information gap with an Australian economic freedom index. This study contributes to the burgeoning economic freedom literature by providing rankings of relative economic freedom for the six Australian states in 2011. Indeed, this study is the first of its type for Australia, and follows many years of quantitative research undertaken by the likes of the Fraser Institute and Heritage Foundation comparing Australia\u27s economic freedom ranking with that of other countries. An economic freedom index is developed which is composed of indicators pertaining to the level of expenditure, taxation and other fiscal activities, the extent of direct dependency by the population on governments for their income, and the regulatory environment maintained by governments. The indicators are derived from statistics of state and local government activities (where available) and, given the extensive federal involvement in Australian fiscal and regulatory affairs, the statistical information is then supplemented by data on commonwealth government activities depending on availability and applicability. The information used to construct the indicators, and ultimately the economic freedom index value, is drawn from publicly available sources and may be replicated by interested parties for their own purposes. There already exist several sub-national economic freedom indexes for other advanced economies. Most notable are the Fraser Instituteʼs annual Economic Freedom of North America report, and studies undertaken in recent years by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation-Liberales Institut (Germany), Centro Luigi Einaudi (Italy) and the Pacific Research Institute (United States). Studies have also emerged which include economic freedom considerations alongside a broader suite of personal freedom indicators. For example, the Mercatus Center Freedom in the 50 States ranks the relative freedom of the US states using numerous economic, fiscal, personal and regulatory freedom indicators. While this study does not assume the more comprehensive approach to quantifying relative personal freedom rankings, similar to that of the Mercatus Center research, in many respects it still provides a more comprehensive account of factors likely to affect economic freedom than most other available economic freedom indexes. In particular, the inclusion of government dependency and regulatory environment variables can be regarded as advances in this respect. As noted above, international rankings of economic freedom are now well established. Australia has ranked favourably in terms of the international economic freedom rankings in recent years, typically within the top five of rankings in terms of overall relative economic freedom scores. The economic freedom rankings of the Australian states published in this study should be taken as being complementary to the existing international rankings, and not supplanting them

Children and young people's behaviour in accidental dwelling fires: A systematic review of the qualitative literature

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Children and young people are considered one of the most vulnerable population groups when exposed to accidental dwelling fires. Understanding how children behave in these circumstances and the reasons for their decision making are important to support rescue and fire safety education. We undertook a systematic review of the qualitative literature to identify studies where children and young people were asked to recount their experiences of being in an accidental dwelling fire in order to inform UK Fire and Rescue Service training and fire safety education programmes. We found no studies designed specifically to explore children's behaviours in dwelling fires, and only four studies (including 39 children's stories) where their behaviours had been recorded coincidentally to the main study aim. The evidence arising from these stories was frequently incomplete, often out of date (15–20years old), and 38/39 (97%) of stories were from the United States. This review indicates there is inadequate evidence of the current lived experience of children in accidental dwelling fires to support fire and rescue services in either their fire and rescue training or community fire safety education activities, particularly for non-US countries

Multiple Role Women and their Spouses: Variables Effecting Family Functioning

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of age, education, perceived child care support, social support, role conflict, coping and marital adjustment on family functioning as experienced by multiple role women and their spouses. The family has long been recognized as the most important contextual influence in human growth and development. Nurses have been working with families for generations, especially in community and mental health nursing. It is only in the last decade, however, that there has been an increasing interest in family research among nurses reflected in a trend away from individual-focused studies and toward a whole family perspective. The theoretical framework for this study was derived from the stress and coping paradigm of Lazarus and Folkman (1984) with support of the linkages offered through the literature review. The correlational design of this investigation was based on a temporally ordered causal recursive model. One hundred multiple role women and their spouses were selected using a computerized random sampling from membership listings of employed members of a large organization. This sample provided a cross-section of many professional disciplines. Descriptive, correlational, and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Family cohesion, as a component of family functioning, had 50% of the variance explained, with family role conflict and marital adjustment being the strongest predictor variables for the total sample of men and women. A comparison of the results by gender revealed that social support and coping were more predictive for men, while interrole conflict was more predictive for women. Marital adjustment was the most potent predictor for both groups. Family cohesion, as a component of family functioning, had 43% of the variance explained for the men, and 52% of the variance explained for the women by the predictor variables. Further examination of group differences revealed that women reported significantly more perceived emotional support from relatives, friends, and neighbors than men, while men reported more perceived emotional and informational support from work supervisors than did the women respondents. Women reported more frequent use of confrontive and fantasy coping patterns than men

Synthesizing the First 15 Years of the Basic Communication Course Annual: What Research Tells Us about Effective Pedagogy

Despite the popularity of the both the basic course in communication and the Basic Communication Course Annual, questions still remain about the empirical support for the ways in which we teach the basic course. This essay categorizes and synthesizes 61 empirical studies published from 1989 to 2004 in the Basic Communication Course Annual. The studies are classified into five categories: teaching strategies, teacher and student characteristics, status of the basic course, analyses of texts for the basic course, and assessment of the basic course. Several salient themes are developed and suggestions for future research are advanced

Difference in membrane repair capacity between cancer cell lines and a normal cell line

Electroporation-based treatments and other therapies that permeabilize the plasma membrane have been shown to be more devastating to malignant cells than to normal cells. In this study, we asked if a difference in repair capacity could explain this observed difference in sensitivity. Membrane repair was investigated by disrupting the plasma membrane using laser followed by monitoring fluorescent dye entry over time in seven cancer cell lines, an immortalized cell line, and a normal primary cell line. The kinetics of repair in living cells can be directly recorded using this technique, providing a sensitive index of repair capacity. The normal primary cell line of all tested cell lines exhibited the slowest rate of dye entry after laser disruption and lowest level of dye uptake. Significantly, more rapid dye uptake and a higher total level of dye uptake occurred in six of the seven tested cancer cell lines (p < 0.05) as well as the immortalized cell line (p < 0.001). This difference in sensitivity was also observed when a viability assay was performed one day after plasma membrane permeabilization by electroporation. Viability in the primary normal cell line (98 % viable cells) was higher than in the three tested cancer cell lines (81–88 % viable cells). These data suggest more effective membrane repair in normal, primary cells and supplement previous explanations why electroporation-based therapies and other therapies permeabilizing the plasma membrane are more effective on malignant cells compared to normal cells in cancer treatment

The Joint Program Dilemma: Analyzing the Pervasive Role That Social Dilemmas Play in Undermining Acquisition Success

Tenth Annual Acquisition Research Symposium Acquisition ManagementExcerpt from the Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Acquisition Research Symposium Acquisition ManagementNaval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research ProgramPrepared for the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CANaval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research ProgramApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited