10,811 research outputs found
Social and creative decision making
Research on human decision making is at the present time undergoing rapid changes. From previously being much focused on models and approaches with an origin in economy, much of the present day research finds its inspiration from disciplinary approaches concerned with incorporating more of the context that the decision making takes place in. This context includes psychological aspects of the decision maker and social-cultural aspects of the situation he or she acts in. All human decision making occurs in dynamically changing contexts. One factor contributing to this is that human beings or groups in many situations act as entrepreneurs trying to improve the situation for themselves or their organization. Given that this is the case, it is of increasing interest for both researchers and practitioners interested in the social aspects of decision making to consider the relation between creativity and decision making
The Nuclear Window to the Extragalactic Universe
We investigate two recent parameterizations of the galactic magnetic field
with respect to their impact on cosmic nuclei traversing the field. We present
a comprehensive study of the size of angular deflections, dispersion in the
arrival probability distributions, multiplicity in the images of arrival on
Earth, variance in field transparency, and influence of the turbulent field
components. To remain restricted to ballistic deflections, a cosmic nucleus
with energy E and charge Z should have a rigidity above E/Z=6 EV. In view of
the differences resulting from the two field parameterizations as a measure of
current knowledge in the galactic field, this rigidity threshold may have to be
increased. For a point source search with E/Z>60 EV, field uncertainties
increase the required signal events for discovery moderately for sources in the
northern and southern regions, but substantially for sources near the galactic
disk.Comment: 15 pages, 30 figures, few additional sentences and references as in
accepted publicatio
Firm Entry and Exit in Local Markets: Market Pull and Unemployment Push
Firm entry and exit flows in the retailing and consumer services may be viewed as market equilibrating processes. Local markets with considerable market room and high unemployment ought to be characterized by high subsequent entry rates and low exit rates. However, lack of entrepreneurial alertness may inhibit this. We examine the relationship and obtain empirical results for a range of selected industries in 563 Belgian municipalities. We show that, over a three-year period, (net) entry is positively affected by the presence of local 'market room' and also by future market pull. We find 'unemployment push' effect on entry in easy-to-enter industries, but also a significant effect of unemployment on exit.Entrepreneurship; Entry; Exit; Entrepreneurship; Unemployment
Entry thresholds and actual entry and exit in local markets
Bresnahan and Reiss (1991) derive entry thresholds (equilibrium numbers of firms) for local markets but do not investigate actual entry and exit flows. This paper investigates for thirteen Belgian retail and service industries whether markets with actual numbers of firms higher (lower) than the thresholds display exit (entry) in subsequent periods.industrial organization ;
Stroboscopic prethermalization in weakly interacting periodically driven systems
Time-periodic driving provides a promising route to engineer non-trivial
states in quantum many-body systems. However, while it has been shown that the
dynamics of integrable systems can synchronize with the driving into a
non-trivial periodic motion, generic non-integrable systems are expected to
heat up until they display a trivial infinite-temperature behavior. In this
paper we show that a quasi-periodic time evolution over many periods can also
emerge in systems with weak integrability breaking, with a clear separation of
the timescales for synchronization and the eventual approach of the
infinite-temperature state. This behavior is the analogue of prethermalization
in quenched systems. The synchronized state can be described using a
macroscopic number of approximate constants of motion. We corroborate these
findings with numerical simulations for the driven Hubbard model.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, published versio
Death and Suicide in Universal Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general paradigm for studying intelligent
behaviour, with applications ranging from artificial intelligence to psychology
and economics. AIXI is a universal solution to the RL problem; it can learn any
computable environment. A technical subtlety of AIXI is that it is defined
using a mixture over semimeasures that need not sum to 1, rather than over
proper probability measures. In this work we argue that the shortfall of a
semimeasure can naturally be interpreted as the agent's estimate of the
probability of its death. We formally define death for generally intelligent
agents like AIXI, and prove a number of related theorems about their behaviour.
Notable discoveries include that agent behaviour can change radically under
positive linear transformations of the reward signal (from suicidal to
dogmatically self-preserving), and that the agent's posterior belief that it
will survive increases over time.Comment: Conference: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 2016 13 pages, 2
figure
- âŠ