This paper shows that politicians may not offer to provide a socially desirable public good because the benefits of the public good cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork barrel spending. We present a Downsian model where candidates care only about the spoils of office. We compare a winner-take-all system, where all the spoils go to the winner, to a proportional system, where the spoils...

An evaluation of distributed learning as a means to attenuate the category proliferation problem in Fuzzy ARTMAP based neural systems is carried out, from both qualitative and quantitative points of view. The study involves two original winner-take-all (WTA) architectures, Fuzzy ARTMAP and FasArt, and their distributed versions, dARTMAP and dFasArt. A qualitative analysis of the distributed lea...

A model based on nonautonomous Lotka-Volterra system for web site growth is considered in this paper. Under the conditions that the parameters change with time and the competition conditions are dynamically evaluated, we show that the model exhibits some important characteristics, such as winning alliance and winner-take-all. It is shown that our results are improvement of those of Maurer and H...

Two new dynamic fusion examples are shown in Figs. 1-2. In Fig. 1, the input LDR image sequence consists of four exposures, in which both the first and the second contain a walking people but with different locations. Fig.1(b) and (c) shows the fusion results of the image gradient (IG) and the proposed DSIFT based methods, respectively. In this materia, only the “weighted-average” strategy is a...

A consumer contest is a sales promotion technique that requires participants to apply certain skills as they compete for prizes or awards. This article is the first to employ a game-theoretical approach to investigate consumer contest design issues, including prize structure, segmentation, and handicapping. First, the authors find that both skill distribution and the number of contestants play ...

In this paper, we propose a fast winner-take-all (WTA) neural network. The fast winner-take-all neural network with the dynamic ratio in mutual-inhibition is developed from the general mean-based neural network (GEMNET), which adopts the mean of the active neurons as the threshold of mutual inhibition. Furthermore, the other winner-take-all neural network enhances the convergence speed to becom...

Experimental evidence on the distribution of visual attention supports the idea of a spatial saliency map, whereby bottom-up and top-down influences on attention are integrated by a winner-take-all mechanism. We implement this map with a continuous attractor neural network, and test the ability of our model to explain experimental evidence on the distribution of spatial attention. The majority ...

Recently we have proposed a simple circuit of winner-take-all (WTA) neural network. Assuming no external input, we have derived an analytic equation for its network response time. In this paper, we further analyze the network response time for a class of winner-take-all circuits involving self-decay and show that the network response time of such a class of WTA is the same as that of the simple...

Winner-Take-All (WTA) networks. in which inhibitory interconnections are used to determine the most highly-activated of a pool of unilS. are an important part of many neural network models. Unfortunately, convergence of normal WT A networks is extremely sensitive to the magnitudes of their weights, which must be hand-tuned and which generally only provide the right amount of inhibition across a...

It is a sad fact that among a large cohort of artists and writers, almost all will struggle (say, work for Starbucks) while a small number will derive a disproportionate share of fame and attention. The same applies to the so-called masterpieces that determine a canon: a few pieces displace others from the lists in a “winner-take-all” effect –all the while the neglected pieces languish and disa...