Abstention, ideology and information acquisition

We consider an election in which each voter can collect information of different precision. Voters have asymmetric information and preferences that vary both in terms of ideology and intensity. In contrast to all other models of voting with endogenous information, in equilibrium voters collect information of different qualities. We show that information and abstention are not necessarily negatively correlated: some voters are more likely to abstain the more informed they are. We also discuss the manner in which incentives to acquire information are non-monotonic in terms of both ideology and the level of intensity. © 2013 Elsevier Inc

Combinatorial Voting

We study elections that simultaneously decide multiple issues, where voters have independent private values over bundles of issues. The innovation is in considering nonseparable preferences, where issues may be complements or substitutes. Voters face a political exposure problem: the optimal vote for a particular issue will depend on the resolution of the other issues. Moreover, the probabilities that the other issues will pass should be conditioned on being pivotal. We prove that equilibrium exists when distributions over values have full support or when issues are complements. We then study large elections with two issues. There exists a nonempty open set of distributions where the probability of either issue passing fails to converge to either 1 or 0 for all limit equilibria. Thus, the outcomes of large elections are not generically predictable with independent private values, despite the fact that there is no aggregate uncertainty regarding fundamentals. While the Condorcet winner is not necessarily the outcome of a multi-issue election, we provide sufficient conditions that guarantee the implementation of the Condorcet winner. © 2012 The Econometric Society

The Condorcet Jur(ies) Theorem

Should two issues be decided jointly by a single committee or in separately by different committees? Similarly, should two defendants be tried together in a joint trial or tried separately in severed trials? Multiplicity of issues or defendants introduces novel strategic considerations. As in the standard Condorcet Jury Theorem, we consider large committees with common values and incomplete information. Our main result is that the joint trial by a single committee can aggregate information if and only if the severed trials by separate committees can aggregate information. Specifically, suppose that either for the joint trial or for the severed trials there exists an sequence of equilibria that implements the optimal outcome with probability approaching one as the number of voters goes to infinity. Then a sequence of equilibria with similar asymptotic efficiency exists for the other format. Thus, the advantage of either format cannot hinge on pure information aggregation with many signals

Demand for Slant: How Abstention Shapes Voters? Choice of News Media

Political commentators warn that the fragmentation of the modern media landscape induces voters to withdraw into ?information cocoons? and segregate along ideological lines. We show that the option to abstain breaks ideological segregation and generates ?cross-over? in news consumption: voters with considerable leanings toward a candidate demand information that is less biased toward that candidate than voters who are more centrist. This non-monotonicity in the demand for slant makes voters? ideologies non-recoverable from their choice of news media and generates disproportionate demand for media outlets that are centrist or only moderately biased. It also implies that polarization of the electorate may lead to ideological moderation in news consumption. Thus, our results cast doubt on the oft-prophesied, imminent demise of mainstream media and may help to explain recent empirical findings showing less ideological segregation in news consumption than predicted by extant theories

Competing For Loyalty: The Dynamics of Rallying Support

We consider a class of dynamic collective action problems in which either a single principal or two competing principals vie for the support of members of a group. We focus on the dynamic problem that emerges when agents negotiate and commit their support to principals sequentially. A danger for the agents in this context is that a principal may be able to succeed by exploiting competition among members of the group. Would agents benefit from introducing competition between opposing principals? We show that when principals? policies provide value to the agents, competition actually reduces agents? welfare

Conservación de derivados de carne de ave mediante el uso de antimicrobianos

La carne, debido a sus características fisicoquímicas, es un medio de crecimiento óptimo para todo tipo demicroorganismos, incluyendo patógenos, por lo que el consumo de carne contaminada puede conducir a laaparición de toxiinfecciones alimentarias. Además de este tipo de microorganismos, la carne es un mediomuy adecuado para el crecimiento de microorganismos asociados al deterioro de la carne, y en concreto ala carne de aves, como Brochothrix thermosphacta. Debido a la tendencia de consumir alimentos másnaturales se está estudiando el efecto que tienen sobre la flora alterante compuestos de origen natural,como los procedentes de aceites esenciales (AEs), de forma que su adición a los alimentos prolongue la vidaútil del producto.En este trabajo se realizó un seguimiento de la flora microbiana de hamburguesas de pollo de la marcaAldelís S.L. (Zaragoza, España) para determinar a partir de qué momento finaliza su vida útil.Simultáneamente se investigó la posibilidad de utilizar marcadores de alteración (pH y nitrógeno básicovolátil, NVBT) para indicar de forma temprana la cercanía del fin de la vida útil, además de estudiar el efectode un antimicrobiano de origen natural (alicina) sobre la flora alterante.<br /

Weed identification in sugarcane plantation through images taken from remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) and kNN classifier

The sugarcane is one of the most important crops in Brazil, the world´s largest sugar producer and the second largest ethanol producer. The presence of weeds in the sugarcane plantation can cause losses up to 90% of the production, caused by the competition for light, water and nutrients, between the crop and the weeds. Usually sugarcane plantations occupy large fields, and due to this, the weeds control is mostly chemical, which is more practical and cheaper than mechanical control. In the chemical control, the dosage and type of herbicides has been calculated by sampling, which causes problems of waste and misapplication of herbicides, since the degree of infestation may be variant from one location to another, as well as the species presents in the plantation. In order to avoid unnecessary waste in the herbicides application, there are some studies about weed identification using images taken from satellites, solution that have proved to have the advantage of covering the whole plantation, solving the problems of sample surveying, nevertheless, this method its dependent of a high weed density to ensure a good pattern recognition and its affected by the influence of clouds in the imagery quality. This work proposes a system for weed identification based on pattern recognition in imagery taken from a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA). The RPA is able to fly at low altitude, so it is possible to take images closer to the plants and make the weed identification even in low infestation levels. In an initial evaluation, the system reached an overall accuracy of 83.1% and kappa coefficient of 0.775, using k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) classifier.5621121