Do Irrelevant Commodities Matter?

Do irrelevant commodities matter?

We study the possibility of making social evaluations of allocations independently of individuals’ preferences over unavailable commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We prove impossibility results which suggest that such evaluations encounter difficulties when the ob...

Dark Chocolate and Metabolic Syndrome; Do Polyphenols All that Matter?

Do Workers\' Remittances Matter for the Egyptian Economy?

Workers’ remittances constitute one of the most important sources of external finance for many developing countries. Although it shows a decreasing trend in recent years, Egypt after 1970s with her regular and massive labor migration to abroad has been still one of the gainer countries on remittances across the world. Empirical studies that implemented for various countries reveal workers’ ...

Knowing what doesn't Matter: Exploiting the Omission of Irrelevant Data

Most learning algorithms work most e ectively when their training data contain completely speci ed labeled samples In many diagnostic tasks however the data will include the values of only some of the attributes we model this as a blocking process that hides the values of those attributes from the learner While blockers that remove the values of critical attributes can handicap a learner this p...

Do Irrelevant Events Affect Voters’ Decisions? Evidence from the Field

Does information irrelevant to government performance affect voting behavior? If so, what light does this shed on our understanding of the mechanisms underlying retrospective voting? While recent studies have suggested examples of voters appearing to reward and punish incumbents for events outside of their direct control, these analyses suffer from a principal limitation: politicians may still ...