Assigning tasks to pairs

Credibility of group manipulation in random assignments

The weak core of simple games with ordinal preferences: implementation in Nash equilibrium

Matching with partners and projects

The properties of invariance, stability, asymptotic stability and attainability of a given compact set \(K \subset \mathbb{R}^n \) with respect to a differential inclusion, have weak and strong versions: the weak version requires existence of a trajectory with the corresponding property, while the strong one requires this property for all trajectories. The following statement is proven in the paper (under slight restrictions) for each of the above-mentioned properties: if K has the weak property with respect to \(\dot x \in F(x) \), then there is a (regulation) mapping G such that G(x) ⊂ F(x) ∀ x and G has the strong property with respect to \({\dot x}\) e G(x). In addition, certain regularity of the set of solutions of the last inclusion is claimed.

Analysis of some basic approaches to finite strain elasto-plasticity in view of reference change

BackgroundUnderstanding how end of life care preferences evolve over time is important for valid and dynamic Advance Care Planning. This is particularly relevant for older people whose preferences may be...

This chapter focuses on changes in food consumption that do not necessarily involve changes in hunger. Clinical observations indicate that cancer patients exhibit changes in taste preferences or specific food preferences. Changes in specific food preferences might be explained by learned taste aversions or changes in taste acuity. Reviews of studies that have examined the relationship between cigarette smoking and body weight reveal that habitual smokers weigh less than comparably aged nonsmokers, and that habitual smokers who give up smoking gain weight. Food, water, and sugar solutions were available 24 hours each day. An analysis of caloric intake from laboratory chow and sugar solutions revealed that animals receiving nicotine reduced their total caloric intake during drug administration and increased their total caloric intake after cessation of nicotine administration. The human study was designed to determine whether cigarette smoking and abstinence from smoking affects general or specific food consumption.

When making risky decisions, people should evaluate the consequences and the chances of the outcome occurring. We examine the risk-preference hypothesis, which states that people’s cognitive abilities affect their evaluation of choice options and consequently their risk-taking behavior. We compared the risk-preference hypothesis against a parsimonious error hypothesis, which states that lower cognitive abilities increase decision errors. Increased decision errors can be misinterpreted as more risk-seeking behavior because in most risk-taking tasks, random choice behavior is often misclassified as risk-seeking behavior. We tested these two competing hypotheses against each other with a systematic literature review and a Bayesian meta-analysis summarizing the empirical correlations. Results based on 30 studies and 62 effect sizes revealed no credible association between cognitive abilities and risk aversion. Apparent correlations between cognitive abilities and risk aversion can be explained by biased risk-preference-elicitation tasks, where more errors are misinterpreted as specific risk preferences. In sum, the reported associations between cognitive abilities and risk preferences are spurious and mediated by a misinterpretation of erroneous choice behavior. This result also has general implications for any research area in which treatment effects, such as decreased cognitive attention or motivation, could increase decision errors and be misinterpreted as specific preference changes.

Mechanical and physical properties of core–shell structured wood plastic composites: Effect of shells with hybrid mineral and wood fillers

Regulating Capital: Setting Standards for the International Financial System. By David Andrew Singer. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. 163 pp., $35.00 (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4525-5). David Singer's concise book is about regulators' transnational co-operation and harmonization of financial standards. For Singer, regulators are distinct from lawmakers. He seeks to “demonstrate that regulators themselves are the initiators of harmonization and that elected leaders are important in providing constraints on regulatory policy” (p. 35). Moreover, Singer develops an economistic framework for explaining regulators' specific preferences. There is a trade-off between competitiveness and financial stability. Singer depicts this trade-off and its consequences in a series of standard indifference-curve diagrams. Both stability and relative competitiveness can change, leading to a change in preferences. In general, “a regulator is more likely to seek international regulatory harmonization when its win-set is shrinking due to exogenous shocks” (p. 30). International regulatory harmonization is a way of imposing more stringent regulations for the sake of stability without losing relative competitiveness in global financial markets. The book is well-written and organized, following standard social scientific guidelines. The scene is set—and the need for the book explained—by a brief survey of key historical developments and by a review of the existing literature. The prevailing scholarly opinion tends to see regulatory harmonization as a public good that promotes global financial stability. Singer argues that nearly any standard can be justified as a public good. Yet the regulatory …

Axiomatic foundation of the theory of control systems

This paper is concerned with the stabilizability problem for discrete-time linear systems subject to a uniform quantization of the control set and to a regular state quantization, both fixed a priori. As it is well known, for quantized systems only weak (practical) stability properties can be achieved. Therefore, we focus on the existence and construction of quantized controllers capable of steering a system to within invariant neighborhoods of the equilibrium. We first consider uniformly quantized, unbounded input sets for which an increasing family of invariant sets is constructed and quantized controllers realizing invariance are characterized. The family contains a minimal set depending only on the quantization resolution. The analysis is then extended to cases where the control set is bounded: for any given state-space set of the family above, the minimal diameter of the control set which ensures its invariance is found. The finite control set so determined also guarantees that all the states of the set can be controlled in finite time to within the family's minimal set. It is noteworthy that the same property holds for systems without state quantization: hence, to ensure invariance and attractivity properties, the necessary control set diameter is invariant with state quantization; yet the minimal invariant set is larger. An example is finally reported to illustrate the above results.

Genetic variation in food choice behaviour of amino acid-deprived Drosophila

Using multivariate statistics and fuzzy logic system to analyse settlement preferences in lowland areas of the temperate zone: an example from the Polish Lowlands

For almost 20 years, quality indicators (QIs) have promoted the design of new selection mechanisms of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). Each indicator-based MOEA (IB-MOEA) has specific search preferences related to its baseline QI, producing Pareto front approximations with different properties. In consequence, an IB-MOEA based on a single QI has a limited scope of multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs) in which it is expected to have a good performance. This issue is emphasized when the associated Pareto front geometries are highly irregular. In order to overcome these issues, we propose here an island-based multiindicator algorithm (IMIA) that takes advantage of the search biases of multiple IB-MOEAs through a cooperative scheme. Our experimental results show that the cooperation of multiple IB-MOEAs allows IMIA to perform more robustly (considering several QIs) than the panmictic versions of its baseline IB-MOEAs as well as several state-of-the-art MOEAs. Additionally, IMIA shows a Pareto-front-shape invariance property, which makes it a remarkable optimizer when tackling MOPs with complex Pareto front geometries.