Based on first-hand account, this paper offers evidence on price setting and price adjustment mechanisms that were illegally employed under the Soviet planning and rationing regime. The evidence is anecdotal, and is based on personal experience during the years 1960–1971 in the Republic of Georgia. The description of the social organization of the black markets and other illegal economic activi...

Numerous online communities and e-commerce sites provide users with crowd-based recommendations to influence decision making about products. Similarly, automated recommender systems often use social advice or curated knowledge provided by experts to give customers personalized product recommendations. Little, however, is known about the relative strengths of these approaches in repeated-decisio...

the paper presents a model integrating theories from collaboration research (i.e., social presence theory, channel expansion theory, and the task closure model) with a recent theory from technology adoption research (i.e., unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, abbreviated to utaut) to explain the adoption and use of collaboration technology. we theorize that collaboration technolo...

This paper derives exponential tail bounds and polynomial moment inequalities for the spectral norm deviation of a random matrix from its mean value. The argument depends on a matrix extension of Stein's method of exchangeable pairs for concentration of measure, as introduced by Chatterjee. Recent work of Mackey et al. uses these techniques to analyze random matrices with additive structure, wh...

Previous research on self-other similarity judgments has demonstrated that perceived similarity between self and other depends on the focus of comparison. Based on the Selective Accessibility model, which assumes that comparisons with similar others yield assimilation, whereas comparisons with dissimilar others yield contrast, the author hypothesized that the focus of a social comparison would ...

The relationships viewers develop with media figures have received substantial attention in the scholarship of entertainment. The present research proposes an original four-dimension classification scheme of media figures theoretically based on authenticity across dimensions of depiction (live action vs. animated), story (fiction vs. nonfiction), form (human vs. nonhuman), and traits (super vs....

Importance measures are playing a valuable role in the transitioning strategy to risk-informed regulation. In this report the basic mathematical elements, the F(.) parameters, used in defining importance measures will be further analyzed to bring their properties into the open. The F(.) parameters are used throughout this paper to define the six importance measures used in the SAPHIRE code, to ...

The popularity of personal digital cameras and online photo/video sharing community has lead to an explosion of multimedia information. Unlike traditional multimedia data, many new multimedia datasets are organized in a structural way, incorporating rich information such as semantic ontology, social interaction, community media, geographical maps, in addition to the multimedia contents by thems...

In this paper we present a new computational technique to detect and analyze statistically significant geographic variation in language. While previous approaches have primarily focused on lexical variation between regions, our method identifies words that demonstrate semantic and syntactic variation as well. Our meta-analysis approach captures statistical properties of word usage across geogra...

Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Existing evidence suggests that preferences are affected by whether a price is presented as one all-inclusive expense or partitioned into a series of charges. ...