Let us assume that some businessmen wish to have a meeting. For this to happen, they usually have to meet somewhere. If they cannot meet physically, then they can take part in a video (or audio) conference to discuss whatever needs to be discussed. But what if their meeting is meant to be private? In this case they need a cryptographic protocol that allows them to exchange their ideas remotely,...

Reputation concerns can discipline agents to take costly effort and generate good outcomes. But what if outcomes are not always observed? We consider a model of reputation with shifting observability, and ask how this affects agents’ incentives. We identify a novel and intuitive mechanism by which infrequent observation or inattention can actually strengthen reputation incentives and encourage ...

The study of measurable and integrable selections from a correspondence (set-valued function) has been of interest for some time [e.g., see Aumann (1965), Hildenbrand (1974), etc.]. Here we take up the study of distributions of such selections. The motivation for doing this comes from Mathematical Economics [see Kannai (1970, section 7); the reader interested in the economic applications is ref...

When a non-interactive story is reread, the experience may change, even though the text remains the same. But what if the text is potentially different in each reading session, as is the case in an interactive story – how does rereading change in the context of interactive stories? In our earlier empirical studies of rereading we found that, surprisingly, readers of interactive stories reported...

Perfectionists have excessively high standards and thus are prone to experience dissatisfaction and embarrassment. But what if they achieve perfection? The present study investigated in a sample of 194 university students how self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism predicted emotional reactions (satisfaction, dissatisfaction, pride, embarrassment) to imagined situations in which stu...

Stochastic programs are usually hard to solve when applied to real-world problems; a common approach is to consider the simpler deterministic program in which random parameters are replaced by their expected values, with a loss in terms of quality of the solution. The Value of the Stochastic Solution—VSS—is normally used to measure the importance of using a stochastic model. But what if VSS is ...

Safety standards (e.g., ISO 26262) define safety life-cycles to be adopted for the development of safety-critical systems. Professionals (i.e., safety engineers, safety managers, and, more broadly safety cultureaware personnel) who are responsible of the development of such systems can be, in turn, considered as safety-critical systems. Coursemodules aimed at forming such professionals are crit...

Sample size calculations require specification of the treatment effect, but what if this is not known? Two-stage tests use the first stage to estimate the treatment effect and modify the sample size accordingly. The purpose of this paper is to unify the theory of two-stage testing based on treatment effect. The conditional error function approach of Proschan and Hunsberger (1995) is shown to be...