It is widely believed that voter registration is a substantial barrier to voter participation in general, but particularly so for likely Democratic voters. A popular solution is election day registration (EDR), which eliminates the closing date by permitting registration at the polls. We posit a small positive effect of EDR on turnout and, contrary to conventional wisdom, theorize that individu...

The Boston University PT3 grant project proposed first to train faculty to use technology and then to sustain the gained expertise in a curriculum development project. Education faculty gains in integrating technology into their teaching and their modeling of that use were clearly demonstrated in phase one of the project (the initial two years of the project). In phase two (the third year), fac...

Recent works question the benefit of Promotional Pricing (Hi-Lo) formats. In this essay, we characterize a setting in which cost-disadvantaged firms would rationally and profitably opt for the Hi-Lo format. Essentially, cost-disadvantaged retail firms, such as mall outlets and smaller chains lacking the economies of scale of their rivals, charge higher prices than their cost-competitive rivals....

An objective definition of what a code clone is currently eludes the field. A small study was performed at an international workshop to elicit judgments and discussions from world experts regarding what characteristics define a code clone. Less than half of the clone candidates judged had 80% agreement amongst the judges. Judges appeared to differ primarily in their criteria for judgment rather...

Recent evolutionary accounts seek to explain religious belief and behavior in terms of native cognitive dispositions and culturally transmitted innovations that have persisted because they have adaptive value. Despite the often vitriolic evolutionreligion debate, new evolutionary theories typically avoid challenging the truth of religious beliefs. In this paper we do three things. (1) We descri...

Karen Houge and her daughter were shopping at Edgewater Mall in Biloxi, Mississippi, on December 2, 1992. The parking lot of the mall, owned by American National Insurance Company, was crowded with holiday shoppers. At around noon that day, Houge went alone to her van to drop off some packages. While she was putting items in her car, Houge was assaulted by a man who began choking her. He then t...

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. Literature in social choice and political theory has claimed that judgment aggregation raises serious concerns. For example, consider a set of premises and a conclusion where the latter is logically equivalent to the former. When ma...

We review several different languages for collective decision making problems, in which agents express their judgments, opinions, or beliefs over elements of a logically structured domain. Several such languages have been proposed in the literature to compactly represent the questions on which the agents are asked to give their views. In particular, the framework of judgment aggregation allows ...

Social choice theory is the study of mechanisms for collective decision making. While originally concerned with modelling and analysing political decision making in groups of people, its basic principles, arguably, are equally relevant to modelling and analysing the kinds of interaction taking place in a multiagent system. In support of this position, I review examples from three strands of res...

Overconfidence is the tendency for people to underestimate the true range of uncertainty regarding unknown or future values. It results in observed outcomes falling outside people’s estimated ranges more often than their stated confidence would suggest. Previous research has, however, demonstrated various ways of reducing this bias and the More-Or-Less-Elicitation (MOLE) tool has been designed ...