9 research outputs found
The intellectual influence of economic journals: quality versus quantity
The evaluation of scientific output has a key role in the allocation of
research funds and academic positions. Decisions are often based on quality indicators
for academic journals, and over the years, a handful of scoring methods have
been proposed for this purpose. Discussing the most prominent methods (de facto
standards) we show that they do not distinguish quality from quantity at article level.
The systematic bias we find is analytically tractable and implies that the methods are
manipulable. We introduce modified methods that correct for this bias, and use them
to provide rankings of economic journals. Our methodology is transparent; our results
are replicable
Analysis of stochastic matching markets
Suppose that the agents of a matching market contact each other randomly and form new pairs if is in their interest. Does such a process always converge to a stable matching if one exists? If so, how quickly? Are some stable matchings more likely to be obtained by this process than others? In this paper we are going to provide answers to these and similar questions, posed by economists and computer scientists. In the first part of the paper we give an alternative proof for the theorems by Diamantoudi et al. and Inarra et al., which imply that the corresponding stochastic processes are absorbing Markov chains. The second part of the paper proposes new techniques to analyse the behaviour of matching markets. We introduce the Stable Marriage and Stable Roommates Automaton and show how the probabilistic model checking tool PRISM may be used to predict the outcomes of stochastic interactions between myopic agents. In particular, we demonstrate how one can calculate the probabilities of reaching different matchings in a decentralised market and determine the expected convergence time of the stochastic process concerned. We illustrate the usage of this technique by studying some well-known marriage and roommates instances and randomly generated instances