Larry P. Pedigo: I Wouldn't Trade It for a Million Dollars

Correct ( and misleading ) arguments for cap and trade ∗ Larry Karp

Cap and trade (CAT) results in lower abatement costs relative to command and control, but might increase industry marginal abatement cost, resulting in higher equilibrium emissions. With lumpy investment, command and control leads to multiple investment equilibria and “regulatory uncertainty”. CAT, a first best policy, eliminates this uncertainty. Command and control policies cause firms to imi...

How Not to Win a Million Dollars: A Counterexample to a Conjecture of L. Breiman

Consider a gambling game in which we are allowed to repeatedly bet a portion of our bankroll at favorable odds. We investigate the question of how to minimize the expected number of rounds needed to increase our bankroll to a given target amount. Specifically, we disprove a 50-year old conjecture of L. Breiman [1], that there exists a threshold strategy that optimizes the expected number of rou...

Ten Million Americans Have It

If I Had a Million Queries

As document collections grow larger, the information needs and relevance judgments in a test collection must be well-chosen within a limited budget to give the most reliable and robust evaluation results. In this work we analyze a sample of queries categorized by length and corpus-appropriateness to determine the right proportion needed to distinguish between systems. We also analyze the approp...

Larry.