We investigate the idea that linear contracts are reliable because they give the same incentives for effort at every point along the contract. We ask whether this reliability leads to a microfoundation for linear contracts, when the principal is profit-maximizing. We consider a principal-agent model with risk neutrality and limited liability, in which the agent observes the realization of a mea...

Both acted and real emotional audiovisual speech was collected from 50 Caucasian speakers (from The Netherlands) and 45 South-Asian speakers (from Pakistan), using a novel adaptation of the Velten technique, in which some participants are asked to act as if they are in some emotional state, while these emotions are really induced in other participants. Generally, the acted conditions did not le...

The quest to develop technologies with minimal adverse environment impact has led to investments in research and development (R&D) targeted at developing energy-efficient technologies or improving the energy efficiency of existing technologies. Despite the increased focus on energy efficiency R&D, studies that examine their impact on environmental performance over time are lacking. Invoking the...

We prove that for continuous stochastic processes S based on ( ;F;P) for which there is an equivalent martingale measureQ with square-integrable density dQ=dPwe have that the so-called "variance optimal" martingale measure Q for which the density dQ=dPhas minimal L(P)-norm is automatically equivalent to P. The result is then applied to an approximation problem arising in Mathematical Finance.

Sen [6] proved that by confining voters to value restricted (acyclic) domains voting paradoxes (intransitive relations) can be avoided in aggregation by majority. We generalize this result to any neutral monotone aggregation. In addition, we show that acyclicity is neither necessary nor sufficient for transitivity for neutral non-monotone aggregation: we construct a cyclic transitive domain and...

Many studies on signed social networks focus on predicting the different relationships between users. However this prediction usually separate the links into positive or negative. Neutral links are either ignored or considered as part of negative links. This project is focused on the idea that if neutral links can provide information which in turn enhances the prediction of other links.

It is well known that quantile regression model minimizes the portfolio extreme risk, whenever the attention is placed on the estimation of the response variable left quantiles. We show that, by considering the entire conditional distribution of the dependent variable, it is possible to optimize different risk and performance indicators. In particular, we introduce a risk-adjusted profitability...

In a model independent discrete time financial market, we discuss the richness of the family of martingale measures in relation to different notions of Arbitrage, generated by a class S of significant sets, which we call Arbitrage de la classe S. The choice of S reflects into the intrinsic properties of the class of polar sets of martingale measures. In particular: for S = {Ω}, absence of Model...

We present a simple design of electromagnetic shields for both field expelling and field confinement. Motivated by the concept of neutral inclusions in the theory of composites, we introduce two concepts of neutral shells, and use neutral shells to construct our designs of electromagnetic shields. We also discuss the relationships between electromagnetic shields and cloaking structures and argu...

The paper develops a new class of financial market models. These models are based on generalized telegraph processes with alternating velocities and jumps occurring at switching velocities. The model under consideration is arbitrage-free and complete if the directions of jumps in stock prices are in a certain correspondence with their velocity and with the behaviour of the interest rate. A risk...