BACKGROUND The EuroQol five-dimensional questionnaire is a standardized instrument used in the economic evaluation of health care to measure health state preferences across disease groups. A time trade-off (TTO) approach is commonly used to elicit preferences from the public. However, there are issues regarding how best to measure worse-than-dead states; at present, extreme valuations are round...

For square contingency tables with the same row and column ordinal classifications, we propose a model of quasi-symmetry using the row and column marginal ridits scores. Using the proposed model, the model of equality of marginal mean ridits and the model of equality of marginal variance ridits, we give a theorem such that the symmetry model holds if and only if all these models hold. Moreover,...

Proof. As observed in McNulty [7], a locally finite variety V of finite type is inherently nonfinitely based if and only if for infinitely many natural numbers N , there is a non-locally-finite algebra each of whose N -generated subalgebras belongs to V. We prove the theorem by establishing these facts. We assume the reader is familiar with the basic facts of modular lattices; see [1], [2], [6]...

The framework of multi-adjoint logic programming has shown to cover a number of approaches to reason under uncertainty, imprecise data or incomplete information. In previous works, we have presented a neural implementation of its fix-point semantics for a signature in which conjunctors are built as an ordinal sum of a finite family of basic conjunctors (Gödel and Lukasiewicz t-norms). Taking in...

BACKGROUND The role of environmental factors in lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration (DD) in young adults is largely unknown. Therefore, we investigated whether body mass index (BMI), smoking, and physical activity are associated with lumbar DD among young adults. METHODS The Oulu Back Study (OBS) is a subpopulation of the 1986 Northern Finland Birth Cohort (NFBC 1986) and it originally in...

I study costly information acquisition in a two-sided matching problem, such as applicants to schools. An applicant's utility is sum of common and idiosyncratic components. The component unknown the applicant but can be learned at cost. As learn, their preferences over schools become more heterogeneous, improving match quality. In my stylized environment, too few acquire an ordinal strategy-pro...

Let P = n11 ⊕ · · · ⊕ nt1 be the poset given by the ordinal sum of the antichains ni1 with ni elements. We derive MacWilliams-type identities for the fragment and sphere enumerators, relating enumerators for the dual C of the linear code C on P and those for C on the dual poset P̌. The linear changes of variables appearing in the identities are explicit. So we obtain, for example, the P-weight d...

Fictitious play is the oldest and most studied learning process for games. Since Robinson’s (1951) classical result for zero-sum games, convergence of beliefs to the set of Nash equilibria has been established for some important classes of games, most notably 2×2 games (Miyazawa, 1961), weighted potential games (Monderer and Shapley, 1996), and supermodular games with diminishing returns (Krish...