Uncovered Power: External Agenda Setting, Sophisticated Voting, and Transnational Lobbying

Where does the balance of power lie in a policy-making institution with an external agenda setter, legislators, and lobbies? In a multiple round majority rule game with sophisticated actors, we show that the agenda setter obtains its most preferred policy outcome even if all lobbies and legislators prefer the status quo to the proposal (i.e., the proposal lies in the covered set). A lobby with the ability to recruit supermajorities can counterbalance this power. If contributions are conditional on the entire voting profile, such a ‘transnational lobby’ can veto any proposal at no cost. If contributions are conditional on the votes of each recipient legislator, the transnational lobby has only to possess a greater willingness to pay than the median national lobby to achieve this result. We use our formal model to explain external tariff policies in the European Union following the creation of an internal market.

New Prospects for Organizational Democracy? How the Joint Pursuit of Social and Financial Goals Challenges Traditional Organizational Designs

Some interesting exceptions notwithstanding, the traditional logic of economic efficiency has long favored hierarchical forms of organization and disfavored democracy in business. What does the balance of arguments look like, however, when values besides efficient revenue production are brought into the picture? The question is not hypothetical: In recent years, an ever increasing number of corporations have developed and adopted socially responsible behaviors, thereby hybridizing aspects of corporate businesses and social organizations. We argue that the joint pursuit of financial and social objectives warrants significant rethinking of organizational democracy’s merits compared both to hierarchy and to non-democratic alternatives to hierarchy. In making this argument, we draw on an extensive literature review to document the relative lack of substantive discussion of organizational democracy since 1960. And we draw lessons from political theory, suggesting that the success of political democracy in integrating diverse values offers some grounds for asserting parallel virtues in the business case

Nominations for sale

Models of nomination politics in the US often find "gridlock" in equilibrium because of the super-majority requirement in the Senate for the confirmation of presidential nominees. A blocking coalition often prefers to defeat any nominee. Yet empirically nominations are successful. In the present paper we explore the possibility that senators can be induced to vote contrary to their nominal (gridlock-producing) preferences through contributions from the president and/or lobbyists, thus breaking the gridlock and confirming the nominee. We model contributions by the president and lobbyists according to whether payment schedules are conditioned on the entire voting profile, the vote of a senator, or the outcome. We analyze several extensions to our baseline approach, including the possibility that lobbyists may find it more productive to offer inducements to the president in order to affect his proposal behavior, rather than trying to induce senators to vote for or against a given nominee.lobbying; supermajority institutions

Order statistics of random walks, a test of universality

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The effect of age and exercise on the proprioceptive and vestibular system

Aging is a physiological process associated with decreased mental abilities but also declining muscle function, posture and balance. Consequently, every third elderly person above 60 falls at least once per year, greatly affecting quality of life and independence. Body posture, gait and balance can be improved by physical activity. However, it is not at all understood why and how exercise improves balance function because the neuropathological mechanisms underlying age-associated balance disorders are not well understood. Two main sensory systems complement each other in guiding proper balance: The vestibular system, residing in the inner ear, monitors gravitational forces while the proprioceptive system tracks the velocity and force of the muscle movement. Motor neurons, responsible for initiating muscle contractions, receive monosynaptic feedback from both sensory systems. Thus, direct and functional vestibular and proprioceptive feedback to motor neurons are indispensable for proper balance. It is already well understood that the neuromuscular system experiences age-associated changes affecting muscle mass and force and that exercise is beneficial to counteract aging. However, a comprehensive overview about synaptic connectivity between motor neurons and vestibular and proprioceptive system in aging is so far lacking. Furthermore, the effects of exercise on vestibular and proprioceptive spinal circuits in aging are also unknown. Here, we used anterograde and retrograde neuronal and synaptic tracing approaches combined with balance and gait phenotypic assessment of aged exercised mice to relate declining balance to alterations in the morphology and synaptic networks of the proprioceptive and vestibular system. To that end, mice of different ages were trained for 6 to 12 weeks on treadmill and running wheels. As expected from epidemiological studies done in humans, balance and gait of aged exercised mice were superior to aged sedentary mice, for some parameters statistically indistinguishable from 7-month-old control mice. These results show that exercise done late in life is sufficient to substantially improve balance and gait in aged mice. Interestingly, loss of balance with age was accompanied by morphological changes on the level of muscle spindles concomitant with decreased proprioceptive input to motor neurons. However, we did not observe any improvement in muscle spindle morphology or proprioceptive input to motor neurons with training, showing that exercise likely does not modulate the proprioceptive system. Since also the vestibular system is crucial for maintaining balance, we next asked if the improvements in gait and balance in response to exercise could be mediated by the vestibular system. Interestingly, vestibular input to motor neurons in aged mice was substantially decreased even more than the proprioceptive input suggesting that decreased vestibular signalling with age could be the main driver for age-associated loss of balance. Strikingly, vestibular input to motor neurons in aged exercised mice was significantly higher than in aged sedentary mice, strongly indicating that balance improvement in response to exercise is due to increased vestibular input to motor neurons. The mechanism of increased vestibular synapses on the level of motor neurons due to exercise is unknown, but could involve neurotrophic-factor-induced axonal sprouting. Interestingly, exercise improves recovery from spinal cord injury by promoting axonal sprouting and synapse formation and elevates neurotrophic factors, able to induce synapses formation and axonal sprouting, in the spinal cord. Therefore, we propose that exercise elevates synaptic vestibular input to motor neurons by releasing neurotrophic factors promoting axonal sprouting and synapse formation in the spinal cord, which ameliorates loss of balance in aged mice

The embeddedness of social entrepreneurship: Understanding variation across local communities

Social enterprise organizations (SEOs) arise from entrepreneurial activities with the aim of achieving social goals. SEOs have been seen as alternative and/or complementary to the actions of governments and international organizations to address poverty and poverty-related social needs. Using a number of illustrative cases, we explore how variations in local institutional mechanisms shape the local "face of poverty" in different communities and how this relates to variations in the emergence and strategic orientations of SEOs. We develop a model of the productive opportunity space for SEOs as a basis of, and an inspiration for, further scholarly inquiry.social entrepreneurship; Social mechanisms; poverty; opportunity; institutions;

Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Style Transfer

In this thesis we will use deep learning tools to tackle an interesting and complex problem of image processing called style transfer. Given a content image and a style image as inputs, the aim is to create a new image preserving the global structure of the content image but showing the artistic patterns of the style image. Before the renaissance of Arti�cial Neural Networks, early work in the �field called texture synthesis, only transferred limited and repeatitive geometric patterns of textures. Due to the avaibility of large amounts of data and cheap computational resources in the last decade Convolutional Neural Networks and Graphics Processing Units have been at the core of a paradigm shift in computer vision research. In the seminal work of Neural Style Transfer, Gatys et al. consistently disentangled style and content from different images to combine them in artistic compositions of high perceptual quality. This was done using the image representation derived from Convolutional Neural Networks trained for large-scale object recognition, which make high level image informations explicit. In this thesis, inspired by the work of Li et al., we build an efficient neural style transfer method able to transfer arbitrary styles. Existing optimisation-based methods (Gatys et al.), produce visually pleasing results but are limited because of the time consuming optimisation procedure. More recent feedforward based methods, while enjoying the inference efficiency, are mainly limited by inability of generalizing to unseen styles. The key ingredients of our approach are a Convolutional Autoencoder and a pair of feature transforms, Whitening and Coloring, reflecting a direct matching of feature covariance of the content image to the given style image. The algorithm allows us to produce images of high perceptual quality that combine the content of an arbitrary photograph with the appearance of arbitrary well known artworks

Change Agents, Networks, and Institutions: A Contingency Theory of Organizational Change

We develop a contingency theory for how structural closure in a network, defined as the extent to which an actor’s network contacts are connected to one another, affects the initiation and adoption of change in organizations. Using longitudinal survey data supplemented with eight in-depth case studies, we analyze 68 organizational change initiatives undertaken in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. We show that low levels of structural closure (i.e., structural holes) in a change agent’s network aid the initiation and adoption of changes that diverge from the institutional status quo but hinder the adoption of less divergent changes