Strong measures of group coherence and the probability that a pairwise majority rule winner exists

A Pairwise Majority Rule Winner (PMRW) exists for a voting situation if some candidate can defeat each of the remaining candidates by Pairwise Majority Rule. The PMRW would be very appropriate for selection as the winner of an election, but it is well known that such a candidate does not always exist. This paper concludes a series of studies regarding the probability that a PMRW should be expected to exist in three-candidate elections, by introducing the notion of a strong measures of mutually coherent group preferences. In order for voting situations to be reasonably expected to fail to have a PMRW in a three-candidate election, voters’ preferences must be generated in an environment that is far removed from the situation in which there is a strong-overall-unifying candidate. So far removed, that it is extremely unlikely that a PMRW will not exist in voting situations with large electorates for a small number of candidates.     

Creation of models for calculation of coefficients of terrain passability

Quality & Quantity - The content of this article is a paper about a complex mathematical model of terrain passability which respects geographical and meteorological conditions in terrain and...     

Operations analysis—the promise and the pitfalls

Operations Analysis comes to education too highly recommended to be ignored, after having grown into wide usefulness in industry and government. Reservations about its use stem from the differences between industry and education. As the practitioners of Operations Analysis grew in numbers and experience, they became recognized agents in the constantly necessary changes in industry. Education, now lacking well-defined roles for Operations Analysis, might well seek the help of the private sector in using its tools. The pitfalls to be avoided, however, are: decision-making when only information is called for; problem definitions which yield triviality or over-generality; and failure to communicate convincingly to decision-makers. Operations Analysis can fail seriously when it starts from bad data or dubious premises, as well as when it uses ready-made methods without adaptation, or-worst of all-performs in a vacuum.     

Universally optimal balanced changeover designs with first residuals

Considering the presence of first order residual effects of treatments, a family of variance balanced changeover designs has been presented and universal optimality of the designs is established. The designs use only v experimental units and (v ? 1)/2 periods for v = 4t + 3 prime or prime power number of treatments; t being a positive integer. A special feature of the proposed designs is that ‘in the order of presentation of treatments to experimental units over periods, each treatment is once immediately preceded by only half of the other treatments and is immediately followed once by the remaining half of the treatments’. This characteristic results in reducing the size of the variance balanced designs considerably.     

Putting supplies at the bedside via the Friesen concept

Hospitals designed using the concepts of architect Gordon Friesen are especially conducive to reengineering for patient-focused care. The Nurserver, a closet-like space outside each patient's room, makes it very easy for hospitals to redesign their methods for delivering supplies so that caregivers seldom have to go more than a few feet to get what they need. In this article, staff of Monongalia General Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia, describe how they have used the Friesen design to modify supply distribution processes.     

Price Limits, Information Acquisition, and Bid–ask Spreads: Theory and Evidence

A number of futures markets use price limits which, in effect, preclude trade from occurring at prices outside certain exogenous bounds. Noting that such markets are characterized by heterogeneously informed traders, whereas previous work on price limits assumes symmetrically informed traders, we examine the effects of price limits in a setting where market participants are asymmetrically informed. We find that imposing price limits generally lowers the quality of information acquired in equilibrium, but lowers bid–ask spreads as well. Thus, depending on the relative weights placed by society on liquidity versus price efficiency, there may exist a set of price limits that are most efficient in achieving a trade-off between liquidity and informational efficiency. We perform empirical tests of some implications of the model using cross-sectional data on price limits. We find that price limits are strongly negatively related to both price volatility and trading volume. Though other explanations for our empirical findings cannot be ruled out, these results are not inconsistent with the model's implication that price limits should be tighter for contracts which offer greater profit potential for informed traders.     

Rich and Poor Countries in Neoclassical Trade and Growth

A neoclassical growth model provides an explanation for a 'poverty trap', 'club convergence', or 'twin peaks', in terms of specialisation and international trade. The model has many countries with identical linearly homogeneous technologies for producing three goods using capital and labour. With diverse initial endowments, initial equilibrium has unequal factor prices and two diversification cones. With savings out of wages, following Galor (1996), there may easily be multiple steady states. Poor countries converge to a low steady state while rich countries converge to a high one, even though all share identical technological and behavioural parameters.