NMHDECAY: A Fortran Code for the Higgs Masses, Couplings and Decay Widths in the NMSSM

The Fortran code NMHDECAY computes the masses, couplings and decay widths of all Higgs bosons of the NMSSM in terms of its parameters at the electroweak (SUSY breaking) scale: the Yukawa couplings lambda and kappa, the soft trilinear terms A_lambda and A_kappa, and tan(beta) and mu_eff = lambda*. The computation of the spectrum includes leading two loop terms, electroweak corrections and propagator corrections. The computation of the decay widths is carried out as in HDECAY, but (for the moment) without three body decays. Each point in parameter space is checked against negative Higgs bosons searches at LEP, including unconventional channels relevant for the NMSSM. One version of the program uses generalized SLHA conventions for input and output.Comment: Typos corrected, references added, radiative corrections written out explicitely in new appendix

EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF INTERACTIONS IN WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR CERTIFIED ORGANIC AND NON-GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS

Consumer/Household Economics,

Outreach at the match: a cautionary tale

John Baruch, Ulrich Kolb, Helen Fraser and Jen Heyes share some of the pitfalls they encountered when combining outreach with football; they advocate a different sort of wow factor

Noise and Bias in Eliciting Preferences

In the context of eliciting preferences for decision making under risk, we ask the question: "which might be the 'best' method for eliciting such preferences?". It is well known that different methods differ in terms of the bias in the elicitation; it is rather less well-known that different methods differ in terms of their noisiness. The optimal trade-off depends upon the relative magnitutdes of these two effects. We examine four different elicitation mechanisms (pairwise choice, willingness-to-pay, willingness-to-accept, and certainty equivalents) and estimate both effect. Our results suggest that economists might be better advised to use what appears to be a relatively inefficient elicitation technique (i.e. pairwise choice) in order to avoid trhe bias in better-known and more widely-used techniques.Pairwise choice, willingness-to-pay, willingness-to-accept, errors, noise, biases

Counter Attack on Byzantine Generals: Parameterized Model Checking of Fault-tolerant Distributed Algorithms

We introduce an automated parameterized verification method for fault-tolerant distributed algorithms (FTDA). FTDAs are parameterized by both the number of processes and the assumed maximum number of Byzantine faulty processes. At the center of our technique is a parametric interval abstraction (PIA) where the interval boundaries are arithmetic expressions over parameters. Using PIA for both data abstraction and a new form of counter abstraction, we reduce the parameterized problem to finite-state model checking. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of our method by verifying several variants of the well-known distributed algorithm by Srikanth and Toueg. Our semi-decision procedures are complemented and motivated by an undecidability proof for FTDA verification which holds even in the absence of interprocess communication. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to achieve parameterized automated verification of Byzantine FTDA