Better than average? When can we say that subsampling of items is better than statistical summary representations?

Better than average? When can we say that subsampling of items is better than statistical summary representations?

Myczek and Simons (2008) have described a computational model that subsamples a few items from a set with high accuracy, showing that this approach can do as well as, or better than, a model that captures statistical representations of the set. Although this is an intriguing existence proof, some caution should be taken before we consider their approach as a model for human behavior. In particu...

When can we do better than autarky?

This paper provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of nonautarkic contract in a risk sharing model with two-sided lack of commitment. Verifying the condition takes just one Gaussian elimination of a matrix. Published by Elsevier B.V.

When Good = Better Than Average

People report themselves to be above average on simple tasks and below average on difficult tasks. This paper builds on prior research demonstrating this effect and proposes a simpler explanation for it: that people easily conflate relative with absolute evaluation, especially on ambiguous measures of evaluation. The paper then presents a series of four studies that examine this conflation expl...

Can we do better than dobutamine?

When poll is better than interrupt

In a traditional block I/O path, the operating system completes virtually all I/Os asynchronously via interrupts. However, performing storage I/O with ultra-low latency devices using next-generation non-volatile memory, it can be shown that polling for the completion – hence wasting clock cycles during the I/O – delivers higher performance than traditional interrupt-driven I/O. This paper thus ...