Our reputation is important to us; we've experienced natural selection to care about our reputation. Recently, the neural processing of gains in reputation (positive social feedback concerning one's character) has been shown to occur in the human ventral striatum. It is still unclear, however, how individual differences in the processing of gains in reputation may lead to individual differences...

p olicy makers in housing sector seeks to use instruments by which they can control volatility of housing price and prevent high disturbances of the bubble and price shocks, or at least, reduce them. in the portfolio and speculation theories, it is emphasized that speculative demand for housing is the main cause of shocks and price volatilities in the sector. the theory of housing price bubble ...

Using the gradual roll out of a large rural workfare program in India, we estimate its eect on private employment and wages by comparing districts that received the program earlier relative to those that received it later. Our results suggest that public sector hiring crowds out private sector work and increases private sector wages. We compute the implied welfare gains of the program by consum...

The League of Arab States (also known as the Arab League) is well past its sixth decade of establishment. However, it has a long way to go to achieve the objectives enumerated in its charter. In a sense, there is much stronger propensity towards disintegration than integration in the League. This article seeks to study the reasons that account for the failure of such integration in the Arab Lea...

We explore situations in which a decision-maker bears responsibility for somebody else's outcomes as well as for her own. We study such choices for gains and losses, and for different gain probabilities. For 50-50 lotteries over gains we find that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk aversion. In the loss domain, on the other hand, we find significantly different behavio...

In this paper we consider the use of non-linear methods for feature adaptation to reduce the mismatch between test and training conditions. The non-linearity is introduced by using the posteriors of a set of Gaussians to adapt the original features. Parameters are estimated to maximize the likelihood of the test data. The modeling framework used is based on the fMPEmodels [1]. We observe signif...