Is a sense of humour a virtue? In an informal sense of the term ‘virtue’, of course it is. A sense of humour is a trait nobody wants to be thought of as lacking, and one that we value in partners, friends and colleagues alike. But the claim that a sense of humour is a moral virtue seems far more controversial. Yet in a fascinating article, just this claim has been advanced by Robert C. Roberts,...

Housing finance is a nontraditional field where actuarial expertise could be applied fruitfully. The development of mortgage instruments requires the application of financial mathematics, while the evaluation and management of the financial risks to which borrowers and lenders are exposed require a knowledge of insurance principles. This paper splits the financial costs of home ownership into s...

Home equity conversion as presently constituted or proposed usually does not deal well with the potential problem of moral hazard. Once homeowners know that the risk of poor market performance of their homes is borne by investors, they have an incentive to neglect to take steps to maintain the homes’ values. They may thus create serious future losses for the investors. A calibrated model for as...

Article history: In a framework of repeatedReceived 12 April 2007 Received in revised form 2 July 2008 Accepted 10 July 2008 Available online 17 July 2008

In this paper, for solving the moral hazard problem of super nodes in VOIP network and achieving better communication quality, we establish a reward mechanism based on classical efficiency-wage models. In the reward mechanism, the function of reward is to encourage super nodes to contribute their bandwidth and cover their effort costs, whereas the function of fine is to prevent opportunistic su...

Microphone arrays are widely used to detect, locate, and track a stationary or moving speaker. The first step is to estimate the time delay, between the speech signals received by a pair of microphones. Conventional methods like generalized crosscorrelation are based on the spectral content of the vocal tract system in the speech signal. The spectral content of the speech signal is affected due...