Session 3-4-C: Are Lottery Players Affected by Random Shocks? Evidence from China’s Individual Lottery Betting Panel Data

I explore a unique, individual level, lottery betting panel data and show that lottery gambling is significantly affected by lottery winning history even though this winning history is shown to be merely an exogenous random shock. This panel data records lottery players’ collective lottery betting behaviors on a Chinese online lottery purchase website. This website lists each player’s lottery investment performance, the ratio between the lottery return and the lottery investment in the past three months, for lottery players’ reference and this ratio is shown to be an independent random shock across players. Based on the data with around 400,000 observations, I find that this random shock significantly affects lottery players’ purchasing behaviors. Specifically, collective lottery gamblers are significantly more likely to join a lottery package proposed by someone with a higher winning rate; lottery players are spending more money on the proposers with higher return rates

Global well-posedness of incompressible flow in porous media with critical diffusion in Besov spaces

In this paper we study the model of heat transfer in a porous medium with a critical diffusion. We obtain global existence and uniqueness of solutions to the equations of heat transfer of incompressible fluid in Besov spaces $\dot B^{3/p}_{p,1}(\mathbb{R}^3)$ with $1\le p\le\infty$ by the method of modulus of continuity and Fourier localization technique.Comment: 18 page

The Merits of Sharing a Ride

The culture of sharing instead of ownership is sharply increasing in individuals behaviors. Particularly in transportation, concepts of sharing a ride in either carpooling or ridesharing have been recently adopted. An efficient optimization approach to match passengers in real-time is the core of any ridesharing system. In this paper, we model ridesharing as an online matching problem on general graphs such that passengers do not drive private cars and use shared taxis. We propose an optimization algorithm to solve it. The outlined algorithm calculates the optimal waiting time when a passenger arrives. This leads to a matching with minimal overall overheads while maximizing the number of partnerships. To evaluate the behavior of our algorithm, we used NYC taxi real-life data set. Results represent a substantial reduction in overall overheads

Functional Bandits

We introduce the functional bandit problem, where the objective is to find an arm that optimises a known functional of the unknown arm-reward distributions. These problems arise in many settings such as maximum entropy methods in natural language processing, and risk-averse decision-making, but current best-arm identification techniques fail in these domains. We propose a new approach, that combines functional estimation and arm elimination, to tackle this problem. This method achieves provably efficient performance guarantees. In addition, we illustrate this method on a number of important functionals in risk management and information theory, and refine our generic theoretical results in those cases

Manufacturing Excellence: A Case Study on the Improvement Journey of Operations Management

This case illustrates the operations management improvement journey of LP Semiconductor Co. Ltd. What the teaching case describes includes strategic thrusts and priorities of improvement, design of operations, managing of operations, and adaptation of operations. With the information provided by the case, participants could discuss the current situation and action for continued improvement from all dimensions of operations management. From the teaching case, participants could learn how to use the theories and methods of operations management in actual business practice in order to achieve the ultimate goal of manufacturing excellence

Does Near Win Affect People\u27s Investment Behavior?

Near win is a special kind of failure that comes closely to actual success. It shows up frequently in people’s investment behavior. Only a few studies have researched on the relation between near win and its impact on the future investment. And in the literature, there are conflicting results on this issue. In this paper, we examine the effect of near win on people’s investment amount by exploiting a unique panel individual level lottery purchase data with over 100,000 players which trace each of their purchases for several months. We find that people who have experienced a near win would invest more money in buying FC3D lottery. It suggest that near win would motivate people to increase their investment amount