How the U.S. Treasury should auction its debt

The U.S. Treasury could raise more revenue if it changed the way it auctions its debt. Under the current procedure, all bidders whose competitive bids for Treasury securities are accepted pay the prices they bid; different winning bidders, that is, pay different prices. Instead, economic theory says, all winning bidders should all pay the same price—that of the highest bid not accepted, or the price that just clears the market. This procedural change would increase the revenue that Treasury auctions raise primarily because it would decrease the amount of resources that bidders would spend collecting information about what other bidders are likely to do. It would also reduce the incentives for traders to attempt to manipulate the securities market.Government securities

Comparison of Public Choice Systems

The area of social decision-making is one in which the disciplines of game theory, political science, and economics all meet. One of the simplest decisions to be faced is the election of one candidate from several. Various voting systems have been proposed for such elections. In order to compare these systems in terms of their tendency to elect a candidate representative of the voters’ preferences, a measure of “effectiveness” has been developed. The study of the effectiveness of voting systems is continued in this paper. In particular, two families of voting systems are found to contain three- and four-candidate systems which are more effective than any previously discussed. Voting systems can be compared in terms of their effectiveness in representing the preferences of the voters. Several generalizations of the standard voting system (in which each voter casts a single vote) are considered, as in the Borda system (in which the candidates receive votes proportional to the ranks assigned them by the voters). For elections involving three or more candidates, it is found that the Borda voting system is markedly more effective than the standard system. For many-candidate elections, the Borda system is essentially as effective as any voting system can be

Subjectivity in the Valuation of Games

The recent axiomatic study of probabilistic values of games has clarified the relationship between various valuation methods and the players’ subjective perceptions of the coalition-formation process. This has important bearing upon the increasingly-common use of the Banzhaf value in measuring the apportionment of power among the players in voting games. The incompatibility of the players’ hypothesized subjective beliefs (under the Banzhaf valuation scheme) leads to the strange phenomenon of “pitfall” points (points of value discontinuity) in weighted majority games with several major players and an ocean of minor players. Such results argue against the use of the Banzhaf value (or indeed, of any value other than the Shapley-Shubik index) in the measurement of power in weighted voting systems

Heuristic Spike Sorting Tuner (HSST), a framework to determine optimal parameter selection for a generic spike sorting algorithm

Extracellular microelectrodes frequently record neural activity from more than one neuron in the vicinity of the electrode. The process of labeling each recorded spike waveform with the identity of its source neuron is called spike sorting and is often approached from an abstracted statistical perspective. However, these approaches do not consider neurophysiological realities and may ignore important features that could improve the accuracy of these methods. Further, standard algorithms typically require selection of at least one free parameter, which can have significant effects on the quality of the output. We describe a Heuristic Spike Sorting Tuner (HSST) that determines the optimal choice of the free parameters for a given spike sorting algorithm based on the neurophysiological qualification of unit isolation and signal discrimination. A set of heuristic metrics are used to score the output of a spike sorting algorithm over a range of free parameters resulting in optimal sorting quality. We demonstrate that these metrics can be used to tune parameters in several spike sorting algorithms. The HSST algorithm shows robustness to variations in signal to noise ratio, number and relative size of units per channel. Moreover, the HSST algorithm is computationally efficient, operates unsupervised, and is parallelizable for batch processing