Business training programs are a common form of support to small businesses, but organizations providing this training often struggle to get business owners to attend. We evaluate the role of invitation choice structure in determining agreement to participate and actual attendance. A field experiment randomly assigned female small business owners in Kenya (N = 1172) to one of three invitation t...

BACKGROUND Characteristics associated with the response to a personalized, mailed invitation for the Papanicolaou (Pap) test vary among women. This study assesses the relationship between selected characteristics (e.g., demographic, obstetric, Pap history) and the response to a letter of invitation to undergo a Pap test among Mexican women affiliated with the Mexican Social Security Institute (...

BACKGROUND Despite concerns that facilitating informed choice would decrease diabetes screening uptake, 'informed choice' invitations that increased knowledge did not affect attendance (the DICISION trial). We explored possible reasons using data from an experimental analogue study undertaken to develop the invitations. We tested a model of the impact on knowledge, attitude and intentions of a ...

* The author is an Associate Professor of Accounting on the faculty of the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The essay is written based on a few lectures on accounting theory given at various universities. The author thanks the audience at these lectures. In preparing the written manuscript, comments by Xijia Su of City University of Hong Ko...

J. Andrew Bagnell March 15, 2015 J. A. Bagnell is an associate professor at the Robotics Institute and Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Imitation learning is the study of algorithms that attempt to improve performance by mimicking a teacher’s decisions and behaviors. Such techniques promise to enable effective “programming by demonstration” to automate tasks, such as d...

Multiple scattering is an important and interesting topic, of relevance in a wide variety of physical contexts. In this short paper, we attempt to review some of the theory and applications with the aim of encouraging further investigations. For simplicity, we consider the scattering of two-dimensional time-harmonic acoustic waves by hard parallel cylinders. Methods described include separation...