1,721,363 research outputs found
The effect of information on the performance of negotiation models
No full textNegotiation is an everyday task in economic processes; ranging from corporations to markets, from agents to nations, always there is the need to mediate between conflicting intents or expectations. Therefore, in the scientific literature and in practice, several negotiation procedures have been developed, each one elaborated to perform in a specific context and under particular assumptions, as, for example, voting systems, auction and fair division mechanisms, negotiation protocols, and so on. All these may seem disjoined from each other, as their contexts are; nevertheless they all share the same assumption that each subject pursues his own best utility. Moreover, despite their specialization, they all have some problems in practical use like, for example, the presence of a dictator, the lack of truthfulness, or the possibility of being manipulated by fictitious declarations.
In this contribution we focus on the negotiation over continuous issues and in particular we analyze the jointly Improving Direction Method (IDM), which is known for its generality, since different other negotiation protocols can be seen as an its particular subclass, and also because it has the nice theoretical property of being Pareto efficient. Nevertheless it is easy to implement, which makes IDM the perfect candidate for an automated negotiation support system.
Despite its theoretical properties, we show the practical inefficiency of this method (even in the simple case of just two negotiating parties), which reduces significantly its performance in the operative context. In particular we show that the main drawback of IDM is due to the possibility to retrieve information about other ones utilities during the negotiation steps and to exploit it to manipulate the negotiation itself. For better explaining this phenomenon we show the deep connection between negotiation and the social choice problem. The bridge we build allows to carry in this context the Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, thus implying that each step of IDM (and of all the methods which it generalizes) may be affected by a dictatorial or a manipulatory party who can deviate the efficient Pareto frontier to get a better gain during the negotiation.
In order to avoid the operative inefficiency of IDM, we propose a different negotiation paradigm, where the hypothesis that agents maximize their own utility is not modified, while the way they pursuit maximum satisfaction is substantially different, since each agent has to express a sub optimal choice, rather than his optimal one. In this context, the constraint of a sub optimal declaration by one side protects from information retrieval and by the other side it forces each party to leave to the others the possibility to improve their own gains in order to pursue his own best.
The comparison of the performances with the IDM ones in different negotiation domains, both in terms of Pareto efficiency and manipulation resistance, shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
- …
