This paper proposes a multi-winner noisy-ranking contest model. Contestants are ranked in a descending order by their perceived outputs, and rewarded by their ranks. A contestant’s perceivable output increases with his/her autonomous e ort, but is subject to random perturbation. We establish, under plausible conditions, the equivalence between our model and the family of (winner-take-all and mu...

Whom to hire, promote, admit into elite universities, elect, or issue government contracts to are all determined in a tournament-like (winner-take-all) structure. This paper constructs a simple model of pair-wise tournament competition to investigate affirmative action in these markets. We consider two forms of affirmative action: group-sighted, where employers are allowed to use group identity...

Robert C. Turner Skidmore College Abstract After the 2000 presidential election, twenty-one states considered legislation to award their presidential electors using the district system, wherein one elector is awarded to the popular vote winner of each congressional district and the two state electors are awarded to the popular vote winner statewide. Historically, the district system is viewed a...

The winner-take-all (WTA) circuit is a useful computational circuit for signal processing and learning tasks. By adding spatial coupling between pixels, local regions of competition can be delineated. Recently, we described a normalising circuit which enhances Lazzaro’s WTA circuit (1989) only with the addition of a transistor and a global bias to each pixel. This new circuit allows the network...

This paper examines the competitiveness of winner-take-all price competition in homogeneous product oligopoly environments where underlying buyer demands and/or firms’ costs need not be continuous. Our analysis is motivated by the observation that a variety of economic settings have these features. For example, in 1996 an Ivy League university solicited bids from several vendors for its initiat...

The EM algorithm is often used with mixture models to cluster data, but for efficiency reasons it is sometimes desirable to produce hard clusters. Several hard clustering limits of EM are known. For example, k-means clustering can be derived from EM in a Gaussian mixture model by taking the limit of all variances going to zero. We present a new method of deriving Winner-Take-All versions of EM ...

Estimating the depth, or equivalently the disparity, of a stereo scene is a challenging problem in computer vision. The method proposed by Rhemann et al. in 2011 is based on a filtering of the cost volume, which gives for each pixel and for each hypothesized disparity a cost derived from pixel-by-pixel comparison. The filtering is performed by the guided filter proposed by He et al. in 2010. It...