111,920 research outputs found
Budget-Balanced and Nearly Efficient Randomized Mechanisms: Public Goods and Beyond
No full textMany scenarios where participants hold private information require payments to encourage truthful revelation. Some of these scenarios have no natural residual claimant who would absorb the budget surplus or cover the deficit. Faltings proposed the idea of excluding one agent uniformly at random and making him the residual claimant. Based on this idea, we propose two classes of public good mechanisms and derive optimal ones within each class: Faltings' mechanism is optimal in one of the classes. We then move on to general mechanism design settings, where we prove guarantees on the social welfare achieved by Faltings' mechanism. Finally, we analyze a modification of the mechanism where budget balance is achieved without designating any agent as the residual claimant
Introduction to Computational Social Choice
No full textComputational Social Choice at a Glance Social choice theory is the field of scientific inquiry that studies the aggregation of individual preferences toward a collective choice. For example, social choice theorists- who hail from a range of different disciplines, including mathematics, economics, and political science-are interested in the design and theoretical evaluation of voting rules. Questions of social choice have stimulated intellectual thought for centuries. Over time, the topic has fascinated many a great mind, from the Marquis de Condorcet and Pierre-Simon de Laplace, through Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland), to Nobel laureates such as Kenneth Arrow, Amartya Sen, and Lloyd Shapley. Computational social choice (COMSOC), by comparison, is a very young field that formed only in the early 2000s. There were, however, a few precursors. For instance, David Gale and Lloyd Shapley’s algorithm for finding stable matchings between two groups of people with preferences over each other, dating back to 1962, truly had a computational flavor. And in the late 1980s, a series of papers by John Bartholdi, Craig Tovey, and Michael Trick showed that, on the one hand, computational complexity, as studied in theoretical computer science, can serve as a barrier against strategic manipulation in elections, but on the other hand, it can also prevent the efficient use of some voting rules altogether. Around the same time, a research group around Bernard Monjardet and Olivier Hudry also started to study the computational complexity of preference aggregation procedures. Assessing the computational difficulty of determining the output of a voting rule, or of manipulating it, is a wonderful example of the importation of a concept from one field, theoretical computer science, to what at that time was still considered an entirely different one, social choice theory. It is this interdisciplinary view on collective decision making that defines computational social choice as a field. But, importantly, the contributions of computer science to social choice theory are not restricted to the design and analysis of algorithms for preexisting social choice problems. Rather, the arrival of computer science on the scene led researchers to revisit the old problem of social choice from scratch. It offered new perspectives, and it led to many new types of questions, thereby arguably contributing significantly to a revival of social choice theory as a whole.</p
author-bios-SRD-19-0063.R1 – Supplemental material for The Network Structure of Police Misconduct
No full textSupplemental material, author-bios-SRD-19-0063.R1 for The Network Structure of Police Misconduct by George Wood, Daria Roithmayr and Andrew V. Papachristos in Socius</p
Prediction mechanisms that do not incentivize undesirable actions
No full textA potential downside of prediction markets is that they may incentivize agents to take undesirable actions in the real world. For example, a prediction market for whether a terrorist attack will happen may incentivize terrorism, and an in-house prediction market for whether a product will be successfully released may incentivize sabotage. In this paper, we study principal-aligned prediction mechanisms–mechanisms that do not incentivize undesirable actions. We characterize all principal-aligned proper scoring rules, and we show an “overpayment” result, which roughly states that with n agents, any prediction mechanism that is principal-aligned will, in the worst case, require the principal to pay Θ(n) times as much as a mechanism that is not. We extend our model to allow uncertainties about the principal’s utility and restrictions on agents’ actions, showing a richer characterization and a similar “overpayment” result.Peng Shi, Vincent Conitzer, Mingyu Gu
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
No full text“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Ethics by Design: Necessity or Curse?
No full textEthics by Design concerns the methods, algorithms and tools needed to endow autonomous agents with the capability to reason about the ethical aspects of their decisions, and the methods, tools and formalisms to guarantee that an agent's behavior remains within given moral bounds. In this context some questions arise: How and to what extent can agents understand the social reality in which they operate, and the other intelligences (AI, animals and humans) with which they co-exist? What are the ethical concerns in the emerging new forms of society, and how do we ensure the human dimension is upheld in interactions and decisions by autonomous agents?. But overall, the central question is: "Can we, and should we, build ethically-aware agents?" This paper presents initial conclusions from the thematic day of the same name held at PRIMA2017, on October 2017.Interactive IntelligenceEnergie and Industri
Welfare undominated Groves mechanisms
No full textA common objective in mechanism design is to choose the outcome (for example, allocation of resources) that maximizes the sum of the agents’ valuations, without introducing incentives for agents to misreport their preferences. The class of Groves mechanisms achieves this; however, these mechanisms require the agents to make payments, thereby reducing the agents’ total welfare.
In this paper we introduce a measure for comparing two mechanisms with respect to the final welfare they generate. This measure induces a partial order on mechanisms and we study the question of finding minimal elements with respect to this partial order. In particular, we say a non-deficit Groves mechanism is welfare undominated if there exists no other non-deficit Groves mechanism that always has a smaller or equal sum of payments. We focus on two domains: (i) auctions with multiple identical units and unit-demand bidders, and (ii) mechanisms for public project problems. In the first domain we analytically characterize all welfare undominated Groves mechanisms that are anonymous and have linear payment functions, by showing that the family of optimal-in-expectation linear redistribution mechanisms, which were introduced in [6] and include the Bailey-Cavallo mechanism [1,2], coincides with the family of welfare undominated Groves mechanisms that are anonymous and linear in the setting we study. In the second domain we show that the classic VCG (Clarke) mechanism is welfare undominated for the class of public project problems with equal participation costs, but is not undominated for a more general class.Krzysztof Apt, Vincent Conitzer, Mingyu Guo, and Evangelos Markaki
Competitive repeated allocation without payments
No full textWe study the problem of allocating a single item repeatedly among multiple competing agents, in an environment where monetary transfers are not possible. We design (Bayes-Nash) incentive compatible mechanisms that do not rely on payments, with the goal of maximizing expected social welfare. We first focus on the case of two agents. We introduce an artificial payment system, which enables us to construct repeated allocation mechanisms without payments based on one-shot allocation mechanisms with payments. Under certain restrictions on the discount factor, we propose several repeated allocation mechanisms based on artificial payments. For the simple model in which the agents’ valuations are either high or low, the mechanism we propose is 0.94-competitive against the optimal allocation mechanism with payments. For the general case of any prior distribution, the mechanism we propose is 0.85-competitive. We generalize the mechanism to cases of three or more agents. For any number of agents, the mechanism we obtain is at least 0.75-competitive. The obtained competitive ratios imply that for repeated allocation, artificial payments may be used to replace real monetary payments, without incurring too much loss in social welfare.Mingyu Guo, Vincent Conitzer, and Daniel M. Reeve
Využití sociálních médií v B2B prodeji
No full textTato diplomová práce se zabývá tím, jak mohou B2B obchodníci využívat sociální média v prodeji. Na základě systematické rešerše literatury, autor zjistil, že akademici, zkoumající danou problematiku, navrhují další výzkum, a to: v kterých konkrétních krocích se dají využít sociální média v prodeji (Salo, 2017). Autor se na základě toho rozhodl zjistit, jaké sociální sítě, různé technologie a pluginy se dají využít v B2B prodeji - tzv. social sellingu. Social selling se v této práci týká primárně procesu akvizice a okrajově péčí o stávající zákazníky. Autor si vybral kvalitativní průzkum pomocí 10 hloubkových polo-strukturovaných rozhovorů, aby odhalil jak, která sociální média to jsou, tak i motivaci prodejců, proč tato média používat/nepoužívat. Aby autor dodržel správnost vyhodnocení výsledků, data byla analyzována pomocí Tématické analýzy, která v této studii vykrystalizovala 2 hlavní strategické přístupy v social sellingu. Tyto přístupy (tzv. Push a Pull strategie) obsahují praktické příklady a konkrétní aktivity, které mohou prodejci využívat v každodenní praxi. Tyto výsledky jsou prezentovány s důrazem na praktičnost a jednoduchost implementace. Tvoří proto hlavní přínos autorovo výzkumu. V poslední části autor zmiňuje výzvy a manažerská doporučení, které mohou obchodníci využít v každodenním pracovním životě.This diploma thesis focuses on social media usage in B2B sales. Based on the systematic literature review conducted by the author, he has found out that recent researchers (Salo, 2017) suggest further research in the area of how and in which sales phase should various social networking sites, technologies and plugins used. To further fill this research gap, author decided to identify these social media and their usage among B2B salespeople in the so-called social selling process. The social selling process in this thesis applies mainly to acquiring new prospects and tangentially to taking care of existing clients (follow-up step). Author has chosen a qualitative research method via conducting 10 in-depth semi-structured interviews to reveal these instruments as well as motivation of a sales person on why to use social media in the selling process. The collected data was analyzed using Thematic analysis to ensure the right procedure and to identify main themes which crystalized into 2 main strategic approaches in social selling. These approaches (Push and Pull) include practical examples of concrete activities which sales people can use in their daily jobs and are presented with focus on practicality and ease of implementation. These also form the main contribution of author`s research. In the last part, author mentions challenges in social selling and recommended managerial implications for salesforce
- …
