What's in a name? Racial identity and altruism in post-apartheid South Africa

This paper reports the results of an economic experiment which was designed to test the effect of racial identity on generosity in a non-strategic setting. A sample of undergraduate University students was recruited to participate in a Dictator game, where surnames of individuals were revealed to convey information about racial identity. Results indicate that compared to a set of control experiments where participant identity was kept anonymous, revealing racial identity has a significant and positive impact on the size of the offers made. However, while Black participants did not vary their offers based on the racial identity of their partners, White participants were more generous towards White partners than Black partners, exhibiting insider favouritism in their offers.

What’s in a name? Racial identity and altruism in post-apartheid South Africa

This paper reports the results of an economic experiment which was designed to test the effect of racial identity on generosity in a non-strategic setting. A sample of undergraduate University students was recruited to participate in a Dictator game, where surnames of individuals were revealed to convey information about racial identity. Results indicate that compared to a set of control experiments where participant identity was kept anonymous, revealing racial identity has a significant and positive impact on the size of the offers made. However, while Black participants did not vary their offers based on the racial identity of their partners, White participants were more generous towards White partners than Black partners, exhibiting insider favouritism in their offers.

Parameter estimation in stochastic differential equations

Financial processes as processes in nature, are subject to stochastic fluctuations. Stochastic differential equations turn out to be an advantageous representation of such noisy, real-world problems, and together with their identification, they play an important role in the sectors of finance, but also in physics and biotechnology. These equations, however, are often hard to represent and to resolve. Thus we express them in a simplified manner of approximation by discretization and additive models based on splines. This defines a trilevel problem consisting of an optimization and a representation problem (portfolio optimization), and a parameter estimation (Weber et al. Financial Regression and Organization. In: Special Issue on Optimization in Finance, DCDIS-B, 2010). Two types of parameters dependency, linear and nonlinear, are considered by constructing a penalized residual sum of squares and investigating the related Tikhonov regularization problem for the first one. In the nonlinear case Gauss–Newton’s method and Levenberg–Marquardt’s method are employed in determining the iteration steps. Both cases are treated using continuous optimization techniques by the elegant framework of conic quadratic programming. These convex problems are well-structured, hence, allowing the use of the efficient interior point methods. Furthermore, we present nonparametric and related methods, and introduce into research done at the moment in our research groups which ends with a conclusion

Iterative methods for tomography problems: implementation to a cross-well tomography problem

The velocity distribution between two boreholes is reconstructed by cross-well tomography, which is commonly used in geology. In this paper, iterative methods, Kaczmarz's algorithm, algebraic reconstruction technique (ART), and simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT), are implemented to a specific cross-well tomography problem. Convergence to the solution of these methods and their CPU time for the cross-well tomography problem are compared. Furthermore, these three methods for this problem are compared for different tolerance values