Voter Sovereignty and Election Outcomes

APPROVAL VOTING; ELECTIONS; CONDORCET WINNER/LOSER; NASH EQUILIBRIUM.

Anonymous, neutral, and resolute social choice revisited

We revisit the incompatibility of anonymity and neutrality in singleton-valued social choice. We first analyze the irresoluteness structure these two axioms together with Pareto efficiency impose on social choice rules and deliver a method to refine irresolute rules without violating anonymity, neutrality, and efficiency. Next, we propose a weakening of neutrality called consequential neutrality that requires resolute social choice rules to assign each alternative to the same number of profiles. We explore social choice problems in which consequential neutrality resolves impossibilities that stem from the fundamental tension between anonymity, neutrality, and resoluteness.Series: Department of Strategy and Innovation Working Paper Serie

On Domains That Admit Well-behaved Strategy-proof Social Choice Functions

In this paper, we investigate domains which admit "well-behaved", strategy-proof social choice functions. We show that if the number of voters is even, then every domain that satisfies a richness condition and admits an anonymous, tops-only, unanimous and strategy-proof social choice function, must be semi-single-peaked. Conversely every semi-single-peaked domain admits an anonymous, tops-only, unanimous and strategy-proof social choice function. Semi-single-peaked domains are generalizations of single-peaked domains on a tree introduced by Demange (1982). We provide sharper versions of the results above when tops-onlyness is replaced by tops-selectivity and the richness condition is weakened.Voting-rules, Strategy-proofness, Restricted Domains, Tops-Only domains.

Manilulation via endowments in university-admission problem

We consider a two-sided many-to-one matching model where universities offer scholarships to students. We show that every stable matching rule is manipulable by a university via destroying endowments under a fairly wide class of scholarship rules. Furthermore, we show that the set of Nash equilibria of the destruction game and the set of stable matchings may be disjoint.University-admission problem, Endowments, Manipulation

Foundation Movement Monitoring of Heavy Structures – A Case History

Accurate monitoring of settlement beneath the main structures of a nuclear power plant not only demonstrates the stability of the structures, but also confirms predicted settlements, thereby verifying the geotechnical parameters used in the design. At the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station near Port Gibson, Mississippi, rebound and settlement monitoring has been continuous since the start of site excavation in 1974. As a result, actual settlements have been shown to be close to the predicted levels. This paper discusses the planning, installation and monitoring of the settlement instrumentation and reviews the factors that were important to the choice of instrumentation

Experimental Modelling of Flavonoid Membrane Interactions

Flavonoids, a class of polyphenols, are commonly found in fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains. Increasing evidence from epidemiological and clinical studies show a relationship between high flavonoid consumption in diet and reduced risk of several chronic diseases. Several mechanisms, including specific binding of flavonoids to proteins, have been proposed for flavonoids to exert their biological activities. However, it has also been reported that nonspecific interactions of flavonoids with phospholipids can induce structural changes in the membrane’s features (e.g., thickness and fluctuations) and indirectly modulate membrane proteins, as well as influence their pharmacological potentials. This thesis investigates the interactions between flavonoids and model biomembranes through three distinctively different but complementary approaches, with a special emphasis on employing monolayer membrane model in proof of concept experiments using one lipid type; 1,2 dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DOPC). Hence, a well characterised electrochemical sensor system; phospholipid monolayer coated mercury (Hg) film electrode was established by rapid cyclic voltammetry (RCV) to screen structure-dependent interactions of a variety of flavonoids. The data revealed that flavonoids adopting a planar configuration altered the membrane properties more significantly than nonplanar flavonoids. The extent of interactions can be ranked in the order of quercetin > kaempferol > naringenin > hesperetin > catechin for flavonoid aglycones and tiliroside > rutin > naringin for flavonoid glycosides. Quercetin, rutin, and tiliroside were selected for follow-up experiments with Langmuir monolayers, Brewster angle microscopy (BAM), and small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). Relaxation phenomena in DOPC monolayers and visualisation of the surface with BAM revealed a pronounced monolayer stabilisation effect with both quercetin and tiliroside, whereas rutin disrupted the monolayer structure rendering the surface entirely smooth. The following ranking of the interactions: quercetin>tiliroside>rutin, yielded comparable results to those obtained from the previous technique. SAXS showed a monotonous membrane thinning for all flavonoids studied associated with an increase in the mean fluctuations of the membrane. The extent of interactions was concentration and temperature dependent with an order of quercetin>tiliroside>rutin except for tiliroside where a high concentration of tiliroside (>2 mol%) revealed the most pronounced response. In addition to the novelty of employing phospholipid monolayers for the systematic characterisation of a variety of flavonoids, this is the first report investigating the effect of tiliroside with biomimetic membrane models. All the flavonoids studied are believed to be localised in the lipid/water interface region. Both this location and the membrane perturbations might have implications for the therapeutic features of flavonoids

Hyper-Stable Social Welfare Functions

We introduce a new consistency condition for neutral social welfare functions, called hyperstability. A social welfare function a selects a complete weak order from a profile PN of linear orders over any finite set of alternatives, given N individuals. Each linear order P in PN generates a linear order over orders of alternatives,called hyper-preference, by means of a preference extension. Hence each profile PN generates a hyper-profile ˙PN. We assume that all preference extensions are separable: the hyper-preference of some order P ranks order Q above order Q0 if the set of alternative pairs P and Q agree on contains the one P and Q0 agree on. A special sub-class of separable extensions contains all Kemeny extensions, which build hyper-preferences by using the Kemeny distance criterion. A social welfare function a is hyper-stable (resp. Kemeny-stable) if at any profile PN, at least one linearization of a(PN) is ranked first by a( ˙PN), where ˙PN is any separable (resp. Kemeny) hyper-profile induced from PN. We show that no scoring rule is hyper-stable, and that no unanimous scoring rule is Kemeny-stable, while there exists a hyper-stable Condorcet social welfare function