Team formation and biased self-attribution

We analyze the impact of individuals' self-attribution biases on the formation of teams in the workplace. We consider a two periods model in which workers jointly decide whether to form a team or work alone. We assume workers' abilities are unknown. Agents update their beliefs about abilities after receiving a signal at the end of the first period. We show that allowing workers to learn about their abilities undermines cooperation when a fixed allocation of the group outcome is assumed. Consistent with the latter finding, we establish that making learning about workers' abilities less accessible increases workers' cooperation and welfare. When workers suffer from selfserving attribution, cooperation among agents is undermined whatever the allocation rule considered for the group outcome. We analyze possible solutions to insufficient teamwork. We find that team contracts based on a revelation game can improve cooperation as well as the presence of a manager in the team. Full efficiency is however never achieved. Our paper establishes a basic framework to analyze necessary psychological conditions for individuals to form teams. We apply our model to coauthorship and to organizational issues

Fields of Blood

Title: Fields of blood: religion and the history of violence. Author: Karen Armstrong. Publisher: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. ISBN: 9780307957047

Asymptotic approximation of degenerate fiber integrals

We study asymptotics of fiber integrals depending on a large parameter. When the critical fiber is singular, full-asymptotic expansions are established in two different cases : local extremum and isolated real principal type singularities. The main coefficients are computed and invariantly expressed. In the most singular cases it is shown that the leading term of the expansion is related to invariant measures on the spherical blow-up of the singularity. The results can be applied to certain degenerate oscillatory integrals which occur in spectral analysis and quantum mechanics.Comment: 22 pages, perhaps to be revise

Turning the tables on the religious

Mark 11:12-21

Spectral estimates for degenerate critical levels

We establish spectral estimates at a critical energy level for $h$-pseudors . Via a trace formula, we compute the contribution of isolated (non-extremum) critical points under a condition of "real principal type". The main result holds for all dimensions, for a singularity of any finite order and can be invariantly expressed in term of the geometry of the singularity. When the singularities are not integrable on the energy surface the results are significative since the order w.r.t. $h$ of the spectral distributions are bigger than in the regular setting.Comment: 24 page

Correction to: The scaling limit behaviour of periodic stable-like processes

Correction to Bernoulli (2006), 12, 551--570 http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bj/1151525136Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/07-BEJ5127 in the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm