Longer Deadlines Research Articles

An Experimental Study on the Impact of Contact Design on Web Survey Participation

In higher education institutions, web surveys are frequently used for educational, research, and administrative purposes. One of the consequences of this is increasing oversurveying of higher education students, leading to low response rates. This naturally has important implications for the validity of web survey results. Consequently, we set up a methodological experiment at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, whereby the total student population was invited to participate in a web survey in order to investigate which features of contact design can positively influence web survey participation. We particularly focus on subject line content, the communication of deadlines and their timing, as well as the delays between contact moments. The results reveal that students were more likely to respond to a web survey invitation when the subject line is written in the national language in multilingual contexts. Furthermore, although the findings did not indicate an advantage of using a deadline, they also suggested that if a deadline is to be used, a longer deadline might be more beneficial.

How to Set a Deadline for Auctioning a House

We investigate the optimal choice of an auction deadline by a house seller who commits to this deadline before the arrival of any buyers. In our model buyers have evolving outside options, and their bidding behaviors change over time. We find that if the seller runs an optimal auction, then she should choose a longer deadline. However, if the seller runs a second-price auction, then a shorter deadline could potentially help her. Moreover, the seller can extract information about buyers' outside options by selling them contracts similar to European call options. Finally, the optimal dynamic mechanism is equivalent to setting a longer deadline and running an auction on the last day.

Characterizing User Responses to Failures in Aerial Autonomous Systems

Users are often the last barrier in the detection and correction of abnormal behavior in autonomous systems, so understanding what can be expected from users in various contexts is crucial to the performance of such systems. This letter presents the first study characterizing a user ability to timely report and correct autonomous system failures in the context of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (sUAVs). The study aims to explore the complex tradespace which designers will encounter when developing effective transitions of control in sUAVs. We have analyzed these tradeoffs in terms of accuracy and response time while manipulating several key contextual elements including subtlety of failure, transitions of control, introduction of noise in autonomous paths, and amount of user training. Results indicate that: 1) increased accuracy is achieved under longer deadlines without large delays in responses, 2) increased noise, user training, and user responsibility for correction lead to increased reporting times, but only increased user responsibility increased accuracy, 3) users, particularly those with additional training, wanted to remain engaged in failure correction even when such interactions were not requested, 4) asking users to fix failures that they did not report resulted in increased response times and reduced accuracy.

The '15 Days' Debate: Evidence from 10-K Submissions

I analyze the effects of SEC rule 33-8644, which decreased the deadline for a 10-K submission by 15 days. The results prove to be in the SEC favor against the opposing firms. I find that investors value the early release of information, as proxied by absolute abnormal return around the 10-K release date. Using regression discontinuity design, I do not find that firms with the shorter deadline tend to make more mistakes relative to firms with a longer deadline.

Design Aid of Multi-core Embedded Systems with Energy Model

Shifting to multi-core designs is so pervasive a trend to overcome the power wall and it is a necessary move for embedded systems in our rapidly evolving information society. Meanwhile, the need to increase the battery life and reduce maintenance costs for such embedded systems is very critical. Therefore, a wide variety of power reduction techniques have been proposed and realized, including Clock Gating, DVFS and Power Gating. To maximize the effec- tiveness of these techniques, task scheduling is a key but for multi-core systems it is very complicated due to the huge exploration space. This problem is a major obstacle for further power reduction. To cope with it, we propose a design method for embedded systems to minimize their energy consumption under performance constraints. This method is based on the clarification of properties of the above mentioned low power techniques and their interactions. In more details, we firstly establish energy models for these low power techniques and our target systems. We then explore for the best configuration by constructing an optimization problem especially for applications which have a longer deadline than the execution interval. Finally, we propose an approximate solution using dynamic programming with a lower computation complexity and compare it to a brute force explicit solution. We confirm with our evaluations that the proposed method successfully found a better configuration which reduces the total energy consumption by 32% if compared to the manually optimized configuration, which utilizes only one core.

Mobile Data Offloading: How Much Can WiFi Deliver?

This paper presents a quantitative study on the performance of 3G mobile data offloading through WiFi networks. We recruited 97 iPhone users from metropolitan areas and collected statistics on their WiFi connectivity during a two-and-a-half-week period in February 2010. Our trace-driven simulation using the acquired whole-day traces indicates that WiFi already offloads about 65% of the total mobile data traffic and saves 55% of battery power without using any delayed transmission. If data transfers can be delayed with some deadline until users enter a WiFi zone, substantial gains can be achieved only when the deadline is fairly larger than tens of minutes. With 100-s delays, the achievable gain is less than only 2%-3%, whereas with 1 h or longer deadlines, traffic and energy saving gains increase beyond 29% and 20%, respectively. These results are in contrast to the substantial gain (20%-33%) reported by the existing work even for 100-s delayed transmission using traces taken from transit buses or war-driving. In addition, a distribution model-based simulator and a theoretical framework that enable analytical studies of the average performance of offloading are proposed. These tools are useful for network providers to obtain a rough estimate on the average performance of offloading for a given WiFi deployment condition.

Task difficulty modulates young–old differences in network expression

The extent of task-related fMRI activation can vary as a function of task difficulty. Also the efficiency or capacity of the brain networks underlying task performance can change with aging. We asked whether the expression of a network underlying task performance would differ as a function of task demand in old and young individuals. 26 younger and 23 older healthy adults performed a delayed item recognition task that used the response signal method to parametrically manipulate the extrinsic difficulty of the task by imposing five different deadlines for recognition response. Both age groups showed a speed–accuracy trade-off, but the younger group achieved greater discriminability at the longer deadlines. We identified a spatial pattern of fMRI activation during the probe phase whose expression increased as the response deadline shortened and the task became more difficult. This pattern was expressed to a greater degree by the old group at the long deadlines, when the task was easiest. By contrast, this pattern was expressed to a greater degree by the younger group at the short deadlines, when the task was hardest. This suggests reduced efficiency and capacity of this network in older subjects. These findings suggest that neuroimaging studies comparing task-related activation across groups with different cognitive abilities must be interpreted in light of the relative difficulty of the task for each group.

Monetary Incentives Improve Performance, Sometimes: Speed and Accuracy Matter, and so Might Preparation

Monetary Incentives Improve Performance, Sometimes: Speed and Accuracy Matter, and so Might Preparation

What's Advertising Content Worth? Evidence from a Consumer Credit Marketing Field Experiment*

Firms spend billions of dollars developing advertising content, yet there is little field evidence on how much or how it affects demand. We analyze a direct mail field experiment in South Africa implemented by a consumer lender that randomized advertising content, loan price, and loan offer deadlines simultaneously. We find that advertising content significantly affects demand. Although it was difficult to predict ex ante which specific advertising features would matter most in this context, the features that do matter have large effects. Showing fewer example loans, not suggesting a particular use for the loan, or including a photo of an attractive woman increases loan demand by about as much as a 25% reduction in the interest rate. The evidence also suggests that advertising content persuades by appealing “peripherally” to intuition rather than reason. Although the advertising content effects point to an important role for persuasion and related psychology, our deadline results do not support the psychological prediction that shorter deadlines may help overcome time-management problems; instead, demand strongly increases with longer deadlines.