In 1991 Morris proposed an effective screening sensitivity measure to identify the few important factors in models with many factors. The method is based on computing for each input a number of incremental ratios, namely elementary effects, which are then averaged to assess the overall importance of the input. Despite its value, the method is still rarely used and instead local analyses varying...

Due to the public good character of protective measures against natural disasters events, their allocation is very often in the realm of bureaucratic and expert agencies. Based on the economic theory of bureaucracy the behavior of a bureau providing the good ”protection against natural hazards” is analysed. The existing model is extended by further institutional constraints accounting for socie...

To investigate risk-sharing within the household, we model nutritional status as a durable good and we look at the consequences of individual health shocks. For household allocation to be pareto-efficient, households should pool shocks to income. We also investigate whether households can smooth nutritional levels over time. Using data from rural Ethiopia on adult nutritional status, we find th...

Individuals are randomly matched to play a 2 × 2 coordination game where the Pareto efficient and risk dominant equilibria differ. Players choose strategies by imitating the strategy of the most successful individual they observe. So, while individuals interact globally, their observation and hence imitation, as determined by their social network, may be local. When all individuals observe each...

This paper presents a cost-sensitive Question-Answering (QA) framework for learning a nine-layer And-Or graph (AoG) from web images, which explicitly represents object categories, poses, parts, and detailed structures within the parts in a compositional hierarchy. The QA framework is designed to minimize an overall risk, which trades off the loss and query costs. The loss is defined for nodes i...

While normal distributions and related current quantitative methods are still relevant for some organizational research, the growing ubiquity of power laws signifies that Pareto rank/frequency distributions, fractals, and underlying scale-free theories are increasingly pervasive and valid characterizations of organizational dynamics. Where true, researchers ignoring power law effects risk drawi...

The objective of this work is to try to define and calculate the optimal growth path, in the presence of exogenous technical change, without resorting to the discounted-sum criterion. The solution suggested is to consider an optimality criterion expressing an Allais-anonymous intergenerational consensus. The partial characterization of consensual optimality was made possible thanks to the decom...

We address a problem of inventory management of spare parts in the context of a large energy company, producer of oil and gas. Spare parts are critical for assuring operational conditions in offshore platforms. About 200,000 different items are held in several inventory plants. The inventory system implemented at the company corresponds to a min-max system. The control parameters are decided ba...

This paper introduces a new similarity measure called weighted profile intersection (WPI) for profile-based authorship attribution (PBAA). Authorship attribution (AA) is the task of determining which, from a set of candidate authors, wrote a given document. Under PBAA an author’s profile is created by combining information extracted from sample documents written by the author of interest. An un...

We propose a new class of strategy-proof and strongly budgetbalanced redistribution mechanisms called the sequential partition mechanism (SPM). Recently, studies on redistribution mechanisms have attracted increased attention in the research area of mechanism design to achieve a desirable social decision among self-interested agents. However, since no redistribution mechanism can simultaneously...