Informativeness and entertainment are regarded as two types of advertising value that can influence consumers’ attitudes toward Web advertising. Despite of many studies on these two factors, there are two research gaps in extant literature. First, the effects of informativeness and entertainment on attitude are considered separately, yet their interaction effect is neglected. Second, the role o...

We develop a statistical discrimination model where groups of workers differ in the observability their productivity signals by evaluation committee. assume that informativeness depends on match between potential worker and interviewer: when both parties have similar backgrounds, signal is likely to be more informative. Under this “homo-accuracy” bias, group most represented committee generates...

In this thesis I examine clustering evaluation, with a subfocus on text clusterings specifically. The principal work of this thesis is the development, analysis, and testing of a new internal clustering quality measure called informativeness. I begin by reviewing clustering in general. I then review current clustering quality measures, accompanying this with an in-depth discussion of many of th...

Language comprehension is more than a process of decoding the literal meaning of a speaker's utterance. Instead, by making the assumption that speakers choose their words to be informative in context, listeners routinely make pragmatic inferences that go beyond the linguistic data. If language learners make these same assumptions, they should be able to infer word meanings in otherwise ambiguou...

Measuring term informativeness is a fundamental NLP task. Existing methods, mostly based on statistical information in corpora, do not actually measure informativeness of a term with regard to its semantic context. This paper proposes a new lightweight feature-free approach to encode term informativeness in context by leveraging web knowledge. Given a term and its context, we model contextaware...

The first chapter examines the interaction of heterogeneous firms in a competitive market in which firms motivate their workers using relational incentive contracts. In the steady-state rationalexpectations equilibrium, aggregate TFP is fully characterized by a weighted average of firm-specific sustainable effort levels. Relational contracts amplify exogenous productivity heterogeneity and lead...

Background The dearth of health workers in rural settings in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) and other developing countries limits healthcare access and outcomes. In evaluating non-wage financial incentive packages as a potential policy option to attract health workers to rural settings, understanding the expected costs and effects of the various programs ex antecan assist policy-makers ...