There is long-standing theoretical debate on the role of collateral in …nancial markets. There is no satisfactory evidence of the causal relationship (if any) between the amount of collateral required and the subsequent probability of overdues. We analyze an exogenous change in the number of cosigners required as collateral on small loans in South India. Our regression discontinuity approach re...

Social networking sites and applications are the major phenomenon all over the world and are constantly on a rise. As the users share their information and data on these sites, these sites can act as major source for misuse of information. So these SNS take steps stop this misuse of information and allows users to choose what information to share and to with whom. This study is aimed to measure...

The topic of critical hydrogeological phenomena, due to flooding, has a particular relevance given the risk that it implies. In this paper we simulated complex weather scenarios in which forecasts coming from different sources become relevant. Our basic idea is that agents can build their own evaluations on the future weather events integrating these different information sources also consideri...

To achieve sustainable human-agent interaction (HAI), we proposed a new model of intrinsically motivated adaptive agent, which learns about the human partner and behaves to satisfy its intrinsic motivation. To investigate the model’s effectiveness, we conducted a comparative HAI experiment with a simple interaction setting. The results showed that the model was effective in inducing subjective ...

The SES Health Gradient on Both Sides of the Atlantic Looking across many diseases, average health among mature men is much worse in America compared to England. Second, there exists a steep negative health gradient for men in both countries where men at the bottom of the economic hierarchy are in much worse health than those at the top. This health gradient exists whether education, income, or...

In two studies, we investigated the ability of a variety of structural and temporal measures computed from a web navigation path to predict lostness and task success. The user’s task was to find requested target information on specified websites. The web navigation measures were based on counts of visits to web pages and other statistical properties of the web usage graph (such as compactness, ...

In this note we attempt to trace the history and development of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) from its early inception in the late 1940’s through its use today. We see how the earlier stages of the Monte Carlo (MC, not MCMC) research have led to the algorithms currently in use. More importantly, we see how the development of this methodology has not only changed our solutions to problems, but...

BACKGROUND Although the Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (S-TOFHLA) is widely used, misidentification of individuals with low health literacy (HL) in specific HL dimensions, like numeracy, is a concern. We examined the degree to which individuals scored as "adequate" HL on the S-TOFHLA would be considered as having low HL by two additional numerical measures. METHODS English...

background:  the  current study examined race and ethnic differences in the separate and combined (additive) effects of anxiety, depression and problem drinking on the baseline and trajectory of subjective health among adult men in the united states. methods:  this longitudinal study used data from the fragile families and child well-being study. we included 4655 men, composed of 2407 blacks, 1...