This paper is concerned with testing for causation, using the Granger definition, in a bivariate time-series context. It is argued that a sound and natural approach to such tests must rely primarily on the out-of-sample forecasting performance of models relating the original (non-prewhitened) series of interest. A specific technique of this sort is presented and employed to investigate the rela...

Black Africans constitute a small proportion of previous audience research into mobile consumption. Most especially, the teenage Africans, who are most likely than adult Africans to adopt mobile phones, are under researched despite their increasing population and spending power in the UK in recent years. However, they constitute a distinct market for mobile phones with distinct preference for e...

Cryptocurrencies are a type of digital currencies that are relying on cryptographic proofs for confirmation of transactions. Cryptocurrencies usually achieve a unique combination of three features: ensuring limited anonymity, independence from central authority and double spending attack protection. No other group of currencies, including fiat currencies, has this combination of features. We wi...

The Bitcoin cryptocurrency introduced a novel distributed consensus mechanism relying on economic incentives. While a coalition controlling a majority of computational power may undermine the system, for example by double-spending funds, it is often assumed it would be incentivized not to attack to protect its long-term stake in the health of the currency. We show how an attacker might purchase...

Treating people as cases that are proximate in a behavior space-representing lifestyles-rather than as markers of single variables has a long history in sociology. Yet, because it is difficult to find analytically tractable ways to implement this idea, this approach is rarely used. We take seriously the idea that people are whole packages, and we use household spending to identify groups who oc...

Current cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, build a decentralized blockchain-based transaction ledger, maintained through proofs-of-work that also serve to generate a monetary supply. Such decentralization has benefits, such as independence from national political control, but also significant limitations in terms of computational costs and scalability. We introduce RSCoin, a cryptocurrenc...

Based on the data provided by the cultural authorities in the past 20 years, about 40 million audiences of cinema in Iran have been fallen. In other words, Iranians, on average, are spending only 15 minutes in a year at cinemas. The main objective of this study was to investigate this fact hence Bourdieu's theory was utilized to study the effects of social, cultural and economic capitals on cin...