We provide elementary insights into the effectiveness of certification to increase market transparency. In a market with opaque product quality, sellers use certification as a signaling device, while buyers use it as an inspection device. This difference alone implies that seller-certification yields more transparency and higher social welfare. Under buyer-certification profit maximizing certif...

When a surface is viewed through a partially-transmissive material, the optical contributions of the two layers in a given viewing direction are collapsed onto a single intensity in the projected image. If a computer vision system is to recover the scene correctly, it must be able to decompose or scission the image intensity into the separate contributions of the two material layers (see Fig. 1...

This paper identifies conditions under which voters are better off not knowing the policy choices of incumbents: we show that government transparency can actually lower voter welfare. To do so, we analyze a model of political agency where voters face two forms of uncertainty: uncertainty about the incumbent’s policy preferences and uncertainty about the relationship between policies and outcome...

Unlike the Metelli monochrome transparencies, when overlays and their backgrounds have chromatic content, the inferred surface colors may not always be physically realizable, and are in some sense "imaginary." In these cases, the inferred chromatic transmittance or reflectance of the overlay lies outside the RGB spectral boundaries. Using the classical Metelli configuration, we demonstrate this...

Interest in collecting and publicly reporting information about the cost and quality of health care has been growing. Yet questions remain about the accuracy of reported price, process, and outcome information; the comparability of results across different populations; and whether and how patients and others use the information to make decisions. Advocates for public reporting argue that it wil...

One of the great computational challenges in recovering scene structure from images arises from the fact that some surfaces in a scene are partially obscured by nearer surfaces or media. Both occluding and transparent surfaces interrupt the projection of more distant surfaces, and may be considered two ends of a continuum. Occluding surfaces completely obscure the surfaces that they occlude, wh...

the following attempts to discuss the different approaches to privacy adopted by adolf loos and le corbusier, as two of the most influential pioneers of modern architecture. it will be argued that both architects were influenced by the developing technologies of their time, yet they reacted differently to the increasing influence of film and photography on art, architecture and everyday life. t...

An objective of many proposed corporate governance reforms is increased transparency. This goal has been relatively uncontroversial, as most observers believe increased transparency to be unambiguously good. We argue that, from a corporate governance perspective, there are likely to be both costs and benefits to increased transparency, leading to an optimum level beyond which increasing transpa...

Organizations ranging from small groups to large societies routinely set up committees who lack formal authority but offer policy advice to those with ultimate authority (Shepsle and Weingast, 1987). Some examples of such committees include academic departments who make recommendations to a dean regarding hiring and promotion; advisory committees for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ...

This article characterizes the conditions under which holdout (i.e. bargaining inefficiency) may, or may not be significant in a two-sided, one-buyer-many-seller model with complementarity. Our central result is that the severity of holdout (i.e. inefficiency) is critically dependent on three factors, (a) the transparency of the bargaining protocol, (b) the outside option of the buyer, and (c) ...