Whilst the study of resource extraction under uncertainty has a long history in resource economics, there has been less attention paid to endogenous efforts to reduce uncertainty through learning and information acquisition. An unresolved empirical question is the degree to which individual extractors learn from the behavior of other extractors. The question is difficult to resolve because ther...

The concept of adaptive security for proofs of knowledge was recently studied by Bernhard et al. They formalised adaptive security in the ROM and showed that the non-interactive version of the Schnorr protocol obtained using the Fiat-Shamir transformation is not adaptively secure unless the one-more discrete logarithm problem is easy. Their only construction for adaptively secure protocols used...

An algebraic source is a random variable distributed uniformly over the set of common zeros of one or more multivariate polynomials defined over a finite field F. Our main result is the construction of an explicit deterministic extractor for algebraic sources over exponentially large prime fields. More precisely, we give an explicit (and arguably simple) function E : Fn 7→ {0, 1}m such that the...

Recent advancements in pattern recognition and signal processing concern the automatic learning of data representations from labeled training samples. Typical approaches are based on deep learning and convolutional neural networks, which require large amount of labeled training samples. In this work, we propose novel feature extractors that can be used to learn the representation of single prot...

Randomness extraction is the process of constructing a source of randomness of high quality from one or several sources of randomness of lower quality. The problem can be modeled using probability distributions and min-entropy to measure their quality and also by using individual strings and Kolmogorov complexity to measure their quality. Complexity theorists are more familiar with the first ap...

This paper analyzes the potential market power of western states in setting coal severance taxes and the emphasis placed by these states on the development of their coal resources vs. obtaining tax revenues. Three market structures are analyzed. One involves a western regional cartel, setting taxes collectively. The other cases are noncooperative tax equilibria with Montana and Wyoming competin...