Article history: Received 20 June 2011 Received in revised form 5 July 2011 Accepted 5 July 2011 Available online 9 September 2011 The Delphi techniquewas largely developed to avoid the problems of freely interacting groups such as dominant individuals and pressure to conform to the majority view. Our review of the social psychological literature reveals some obstacles to Delphi achieving its f...

study of the limit-point concept [16]. Which factors could dictate the introduction of a topology for a given system of informational formulas? In informational cases, different kinds of reasonable topologies, corresponding intuitive ideas what an understanding, interpretation, conception, perception and meaning should be, are coming to the consciousness, that is, into the modeling foreground. ...

Considering that the movements of complex system entities take place on continuous, but non-differentiable, curves, concepts, like non-differentiable entropy, informational non-differentiable entropy and informational non-differentiable energy, are introduced. First of all, the dynamics equations of the complex system entities (Schrödinger-type or fractal hydrodynamic-type) are obtained. The la...

This paper focuses on issues of allocating authority between an uninformed principal and an informed expert. We analyze the benefits of informational control—restricting the precision of the expert’s information (without learning its content). In this case, the result of Dessein (2002) [8] that delegating decisions to a perfectly informed expert is better than communication when preferences bet...

Recently, Yalcin (2007) put forward a novel account of epistemic modals. It is based on the observation that sentences of the form ‘φ& Might¬φ’ do not embed under ‘suppose’ and ‘if’. Yalcin concludes that such sentences must be contradictory and develops a notion of informational consequence which validates this idea. I will show that informational consequence is inadequate as an account of the...

This paper challenges the prevailing view that strict informational lobbying (in the absence of political contributions and evidence distortion) leads to better policy outcomes. Key to our analysis is the fact that policymakers are constrained on the number of issues they can address, which forces them to prioritize issues. We show how interest groups advocating reform on less-important issues ...

We discuss four solution concepts for games with incomplete information. We show how each solution concept can be viewed as encoding informational robustness. For a given type space, we consider expansions of the type space that provide players with additional signals. We distinguish between expansions along two dimensions. First, the signals can either convey payoff relevant information or onl...

Speech understanding in noise is affected by both the energetic and informational masking components of the background noise. In addition, when the background noise is everyday speech, the relative contributions of the energetic and informational masking components to the overall difficulties in understanding speech are unclear. This study estimated informational masking effects, in conversatio...

This paper tries to reconcile incentive theory with transaction costs theory. We first discuss the fundamental assumptions underlying the use of the Revelation Principle in the standard mechanism design literature and show how various contractual incompletenesses and externalities induced by transaction costs affect the basic trade-off between allocative efficiency and informational rents highl...

We develop an auction model for the case of interdependent values and multidimensional signals in which agents’ signals are correlated. We provide conditions under which a modification of the Vickrey auction which includes payments to the bidders will result in an ex post efficient outcome. Furthermore, we provide a definition of informational size such that the necessary payments to bidders wi...