Economic models of consumer demand and labor supply begin with an individual economic agent choosing actions that maximize his or her utility function subject to a budget constraint. How can we reconcile this individualistic theory of the consumer with the reality that people tend to live, eat, work, and play in families? Economists have dealt with a possible multiplicity of decision makers in ...

When equipped with kernel functions, online learning algorithms are susceptible to the “curse of kernelization” that causes unbounded growth in the model size. To address this issue, we present a family of budgeted online learning algorithms for multi-class classification which have constant space and time complexity per update. Our approach is based on the multi-class version of the popular Pe...

This study aimed to describe trends in family spending on cigarettes and its share of family budget, comparing 2002 and 2009, using the Brazilian Household Budget Surveys from 2002/2003 and 2008/2009. The Expanded Consumer Price Index (IPCA) was used. The proportion of families that purchased cigarettes decreased from 23.5% to 18.2%, however their spending increased from BRL 55.36 to BRL 59.45....

As for the East Asian countries, the total amount of government debt in Korea has risen sharply over the following several years in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the current levels of government debt are sustainable for a severely attacked country, namely, Korea. Under the intertemporal budget constraint model, the study tests for fiscal ...

In this paper, a new model of phytoplankton growth in the chemostat is proposed. First, we give a description of the chemostat and we recall the main models: the simple Monod model, experimentally validated for bacteria growth and the Droop model, which is validated for phytoplankton growth and takes into account the possible nutrient storage. Though our model is quite similar to the Droop one,...