Robust mechanism design and dominant strategy voting rules

We develop an analysis of voting rules that is robust in the sense that we do not make any assumption regarding voters’ knowledge about each other. In dominant strategy voting rules, voters’ behavior can be predicted uniquely without making any such assumption. However, on full domains, the only dominant strategy voting rules are random dictatorships. We show that the designer of a voting rule can achieve Pareto improvements over random dictatorship by choosing rules in which voters’ behavior can depend on their beliefs. The Pareto improvement is achieved for all possible beliefs. The mechanism that we use to demonstrate this result is simple and intuitive, and the Pareto improvement result extends to all equilibria of the mechanism that satisfy a mild refinement. We also show that the result only holds for voters’ interim expected utilities, not for their ex post expected utilities.robust mechanism design; dominant strategies; voting; Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem

Living and Leading Abundantly

Understand what leads to truly joyful, meaningful living - in other words, what leads to happiness. Discover that what gives you the perspective of confidence and happiness is a set of skills that you need to consistently, even if subconsciously, practice.https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/leadhour/1002/thumbnail.jp

Antidepressant-like Effects of Amisulpride, Ketamine, and Their Enantiomers on Differential-Reinforcement-of-Low-Rate (DRL) Operant Responding in Male C57/BL/6 Mice

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a widespread psychiatric disorder that affects millions of people worldwide and is hypothesized to occur due to impairments in several neurotransmitter systems, including the monoaminergic and glutamatergic neurotransmitter systems. Antidepressant medications targeting multiple monoamine neurotransmitters have been shown to be effective for the treatment of depression. Racemic amisulpride is an atypical antipsychotic that has been used at low doses to treat dysthymia, a mild form of depression, and functions as an antagonist at DA2/3, 5-HT2B, and 5-HT7 receptors. Recent preclinical studies have suggested that the S(+) isomer may be more critical for amisulpride’s antidepressant-like effects; however, this interpretation has not been fully characterized in comparison to the R(-) isomer. The glutamatergic system also has been shown to play a critical role in alleviating depression. Several studies have demonstrated that the noncompetitive N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist ketamine produces rapid and sustained antidepressant-like effects in clinical trials; however, few studies have examined the degree to which ketamine’s isomers contribute to antidepressant-like effects. Fully characterizing these differences in a preclinical model of depression may offer important insight into the role of these neurotransmitter systems on depression. The present study used a 72-sec differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) task to assess the antidepressant-like effects of amisulpride, ketamine, and their isomers in mice. The DRL 72-sec task has shown to be a reliable and sensitive screen for drugs that possess antidepressant-like activity as reflected by an increase in the number of reinforcers, a decrease in the number of responses, and a right-ward shift in the interresponse time distributions (IRTs; i.e. the elapsed time between two successive responses). For comparison, the effects of the tricyclic antidepressant imipramine and the N-methyl-D-aspartate antagonist MK-801 as positive and negative controls, respectively, were determined. Consistent with previous findings, we hypothesized that amisulpride and S(-)-amisulpride, but not R(+)-amisulpride, would produce antidepressant-like effects, and all formulations of ketamine would produce antidepressant effects. Racemic amisulpride and S(-)-amisulpride, but not R(+)-amisulpride, produced an antidepressant-like effect, evidenced by a significant increase in the number of reinforcers and a significant decrease in the number of responses. Racemic ketamine and R(-)-ketamine significantly increased the number of reinforcers and decreased the number of responses, while S(+)-ketamine significantly increased the number of reinforcers, but did not decrease the number of responses (at the doses tested). Overall, these results indicate that the racemic formulations of amisulpride and ketamine, S(-)-amisulpride, and both ketamine isomers demonstrate antidepressant-like effects as assessed in the DRL task and may be useful in a clinical context. If either of the ketamine isomers can be shown to produce fewer psychotomimetic effects in humans, then the isomers may offer a significant clinical advantage over the parent compound ketamine. Regarding amisulpride, the present results demonstrate that the S(-) isomer, but not the R(+) isomer, possess antidepressant-like activity similar to racemic amisulpride

Robust mechanism design and dominant strategy voting rules

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107361/1/TE1111.pd

Response of river-dominated delta channel networks to permanent changes in river discharge

Using numerical experiments, we investigate how river-dominated delta channel networks are likely to respond to changes in river discharge predicted to occur over the next century as a result of environmental change. Our results show for a change in discharge up to 60% of the initial value, a decrease results in distributary abandonment in the delta, whereas an increase does not significantly affect the network. However, an increase in discharge beyond a threshold of 60% results in channel creation and an increase in the density of the distributary network. This behavior is predicted by an analysis of an individual bifurcation subject to asymmetric water surface slopes in the bifurcate arms. Given that discharge in most river basins will change by less than 50% in the next century, our results suggest that deltas in areas of increased drought will be more likely to experience significant rearrangement of the delta channel network. Copyright 2010 by the American Geophysical Union

Policy by the People, for the People:Designing ResponsiveRegulation and BuildingDemocratic Power

Policymaking in American democracy is often a process that happens to people rather than by them. This is especially the case with respect to policy that affects people with less power in low-income communities and communities of color. Urban policy, in particular, has historically been driven by business elites and white homeowners’ interests, which have shaped exclusionary policies, such as redlining and single-family zoning— etching racial and economic segregation into the fabric of city space. Even when outsider interest groups and social movement organizations gain enough power to shape the policy agenda, give input into the content of policy, and lobby for policy changes that advance their interests, the standard conception of regulatory design is elite-driven: people whose lived reality will be impacted by policy decisions tend to be consulted, if at all, after policy ideas are already articulated and have gained traction in the halls of power. This Essay seeks to elevate an alternative model of policymaking “by the people” that views the policy process as a means of designing more responsive regulation that emanates from the experiences of marginalized constituencies, while creating an opportunity to build democratic power. Policy by the people involves: identifying problems from the perspective of those suffering harm, developing solutions based on lived experiences of what works, conducting policy design through an iterative process in which solutions are translated into law, elevating leadership of the people in advocating for policy change, and ensuring that successful policy is not an end goal but rather a starting point in promoting democratic inclusion and community power. This approach therefore seeks to enable policy design by people that responds to their material interests—what we call responsive regulation—as it simultaneously promotes power-building over time. This Essay aims to fill critical gaps in the literature on lawyering for social change and policy design, while offering a set of principles to guide the role of lawyers in bottom-up policymaking

Modalities of Social Change Lawyering

The last decade has seen the rise of new kinds of grassroots social movements. Movements including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Sunrise, and #MeToo pushed back against long-standing political, economic, and social crises, including income inequality, racial inequality, police violence, climate change, and the widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment. As these social change efforts evolve, a growing body of scholarship has begun to theorize the role of lawyers within these new social movements and to identify lawyering characteristics that contribute to sustaining social movements over time. This Article surveys this body of literature and proposes a typology of terminology that names, identifies, and distinguishes the underlying characteristics and principles of prominent models of social change lawyering. Our typology is intended to create common conceptual ground in the field. The Article then applies this typology to the case study of one social change campaign to illustrate the ways scholars and advocates can use the framework to think strategically about tailoring goals and strategies to various sociological and theoretical factors. By mapping advocacy to theories of social change lawyering and tailoring such work to socio–legal factors, our goals are several. We hope our typology will launch a conversation that enables scholars and lawyers to evaluate diverse lawyering modalities in light of lawyers’ conception of their roles, their theory of social change, and the contexts in which they work. We also hope that our typology provokes engagement and correction, in the spirit of collectively imagining new ways of inhabiting the lawyering role that support critical social change efforts

An Innovative Approach to Movement Lawyering: An Immigrant Rights Case Study

The role of lawyers in social change movements is more important than ever as communities mobilize around systemic racism, police killings, xenophobia, rising unemployment, and widening economic inequality. The immigrant rights movement is a critical part of these efforts to foment change. This Article leverages an in-depth case study – the rise and fall of the controversial immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities - to explore how lawyers work as part of a community to challenge power and effectuate change. The dismantling of Secure Communities was widely credited to a relentless campaign to thwart the government’s then-expanding deportation strategy. The authors reviewed over 23,000 internal DHS documents, as well as media accounts and court transcripts, and interviewed 30 administrative officials, congressional actors, organizers, clients, activists, and lawyers involved in the Secure Communities campaigns. This Article draws on extensive evidence to identify an innovative approach to movement lawyering that involved coordinated efforts of movement actors on the micro level (achieving immediate goals), the meso level (effecting broader policy change), and the macro level (organizing communities around narrative identities). The Article concludes that efforts at change were optimized when lawyers, organizers, and activists together built a nimble, adaptive, and modular strategy to enhance concerted power from the ground up. Within this new construct, lawyers might develop new ways of working with communities that synergistically exploit the advantages of various social change strategies at any given time, producing strengthened relationships and lasting investments in organized resistance

Predictable climate impacts of the decadal changes in the ocean in the 1990s

During the 1990s there was a major change in the state of the world's oceans. In particular, the North Atlantic underwent a rapid warming, with sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the subpolar gyre region increasing by 1°C in just a few years. Associated with the changes in SST patterns were changes in the surface climate, in particular, a tendency for warm and dry conditions over areas of North America in all seasons, and warm springs and wet summers over areas of Europe. Here, the extent to which a climate prediction system initialized using observations of the ocean state is able to capture the observed changes in seasonal mean surface climate is investigated. Rather than examining predictions of the mid-1990s North Atlantic warming event itself, this study compares hindcasts started before and after the warming, relative to hindcasts that do not assimilate information. It is demonstrated that the hindcasts capture many aspects of the observed changes in seasonal mean surface climate, especially in North, South, and Central America and in Europe. Furthermore, the prediction system retains skill beyond the first year. Finally, it is shown that, in addition to memory of Atlantic SSTs, successfully predicting Pacific SSTs was likely important for the hindcasts to predict surface climate over North America