cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Forfeiture in the Domestic Violence Realm

The doctrine of forfeiture as applied to domestic violence cases is just beginning to evolve in the wake of the reinterpreted Confrontation Clause. With the U.S. Supreme Court's recent grant of certiorari in California v. Giles, the question of how to import forfeiture principles to the domestic violence context has taken on new urgency. In this essay, I argue that forfeiture decisions should reflect the ways in which battering is different from paradigmatic crime. In order for the equitable underpinnings of the rule to be realized, accurate conceptions of domestic violence must inform judicial reasoning. To illustrate how this premise may be operationalized, I examine each component of the prosecutor's burden of proof at a forfeiture hearing: (i) wrongdoing on the part of the defendant; and (ii) causing the declarant's unavailability as a witness. With respect to each inquiry, the dynamics of battering warrant an expanded conception of what is relevant to the court's determination. No separate rule of domestic violence forfeiture is needed; an adequate doctrine simply rejects the notion that a template applicable to violence between strangers can effectively respond to the particularities of violence between intimates. A reconceived framework represents a commitment to an informed jurisprudence of forfeiture, and an insistence that our law be compatible with the remediation of all types of crime.
Taxation and Regulation as Barriers to International Investment Flows

The PaPer examines the shifts in attitudes to foreign investment; charts the dimensions and composition of capital flows to develeping countries; outlines existing barriers and the effects of taxation on these flows, and critically examines the demand for their regulation in the light of the Asian crisis.
An epidemiological approach to the spread of political third parties

Third political parties are influential in shaping American politics. In this work we study the spread of a third party ideology in a voting population where we assume that party members/activists are more influential in recruiting new third party voters than non-member third party voters. The study uses an epidemiological metaphor to develop a theoretical model with nonlinear ordinary differential equations as applied to a case study, the Green Party. Considering long-term behavior, we identify three threshold parameters in our model that describe the different possible scenarios for the political party and its spread. We also apply the model to the study of the Green Party's growth using voting and registration data in six states and the District of Columbia to identify and explain trends over the past decade. Our system produces a backward bifurcation that helps identify conditions under which a sufficiently dedicated activist core can enable a third party to thrive, under conditions which would not normally allow it to arise. Our results explain the critical role activists play in sustaining grassroots movements under adverse conditions.
Learning by lending

Abstract This paper studies bank learning through repeated interactions with borrowers from a new perspective. To understand learning by lending, we adapt a methodology from labor economics to analyze how loan contract terms evolve as banks acquire new information about borrowers. We construct “proxy” variables for this information using data from borrowers’ out-of-sample, future credit performance. Due to the timing of their construction, banks could not have used these variables directly to price loans. We nonetheless find that these proxies increasingly predict loan prices as relationships progress, even after controlling for possible omitted variable bias. Our methodology provides strong evidence that: (a) bank learning affects loan prices, and (b) relationship benefits are heterogeneous. In particular, higher quality borrowers face differentially lower spreads as their relationship with lenders develop – and banks learn about their quality – while lower quality borrowers see loan prices increase and their loan amounts fall. We further find suggestive evidence that banks incorporate CEO-specific information into loan prices.
Internet Payment Blockades

Internet payment blockades are an attempt to enforce intellectual property rights by “following the money” that flows to online merchants who profit from piracy and counterfeiting. Where corporate copyright and trademark owners failed in the legislature and the judiciary to create binding public law requiring payment processors like MasterCard and Visa to act as intellectual property enforcers, “non-regulatory” intervention from the executive branch secured their cooperation as a matter of private ordering. The resulting voluntary best practices agreement prescribes a notice-and-termination protocol that extends the reach of U.S. intellectual property law into cyberspace, to merchants operating “foreign infringing sites.” It also privatizes the adjudication of infringement claims, raising issues of fairness and institutional competence. Like other forms of regulation by online intermediaries, payment blockades are subject to circumvention through disintermediation. Marrying peer-to-peer (P2P) technology with financial transactions, P2P virtual currencies like Bitcoin allow online merchants and their customers to work around payment blockades. INTRODUCTION 1524 I. WORKING TOWARD PAYMENT BLOCKADES: THE ROAD TO VOLUNTARISM 1529 A. In the Courts: Perfect 10 and the Secondary Liability Gambit 1529 1. Contributory Copyright Infringement 1531 2. Contributory Trademark Infringement 1533  Professor of Law, University of Idaho College of Law and Affiliate Scholar, Stanford University Center for Internet and Society (CIS). This paper was initially presented at the 2013 Works in Progress for Intellectual Property (WIPIP) conference, held at Santa Clara Law School. It has benefited from the feedback of WIPIP participants. I would like to thank Mark Bartholomew, Stacey Dogan, and David Post for insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. I owe thanks, too, to Ann Bartow and Stacey Dogan for generous Jotwell reviews, and to Diana Gleason for assistance in obtaining primary documents. 1 Bridy: Internet Payment Blockades Published by UF Law Scholarship Repository, 2016 1524 FLORIDA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 67 3. Vicarious Copyright Infringement 1534 4. Vicarious Trademark Infringement 1535 5. Judge Kozinski’s Dissent 1536 6. Making Sense of the Split Decision 1538 B. In Congress: The Shadow of Potential Law 1540 C. In the White House: IPEC and the Paradox of Non-Regulatory Regulation 1543 II. HOW PAYMENT BLOCKADES WORK: “BEST PRACTICES TO ADDRESS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT AND THE SALE OF COUNTERFEIT PRODUCTS ON THE INTERNET” 1548 A. The Protocol for Payment Processors 1549 B. The Protocol for Rights Owners 1553 III. SOME NORMATIVE CONSIDERATIONS 1554 A. Extraterritoriality 1554 B. Fair Process 1560 IV. WORKING AROUND PAYMENT BLOCKADES: OTHER WAYS TO PAY 1562 A. Vouchers for Downloads 1562 B. Bitcoin and Other P2P Virtual Currencies 1563 CONCLUSION 1567
Organizational Decision Making: An Information Aggregation View

We study four information aggregation structures commonly used by organizations to evaluate opportunities: individual decision making, delegation to experts, majority voting, and averaging of opinions. Using a formal mathematical model, we investigate how the performance of each of these structures is contingent upon the breadth of knowledge within the firm and changes in the environment. Our model builds on work in the Carnegie tradition and in the group and behavioral decision-making literatures. We use the model to explore when delegation is preferable to other structures, such as voting and averaging. Our model shows that delegation is the most effective structure when there is diversity of expertise, when accurate delegation is possible, and when there is a good fit between the firm's knowledge and the knowledge required by the environment. Otherwise, depending on the knowledge breadth of the firm, voting or averaging may be the most effective structure. Finally, we use our model to shed light on whi...
Intertemporal Budget Policies and Macroeconomic Adjustment in Indebted Open Economies

Abstract: We analyze the role of government intertemporal budget policies in a growing open economy including nominal assets in the presence of an upward sloping supply of debt. This introduces transitional dynamics that influence the effects of government policy instruments on the long term fiscal liability. In particular, shifts in capital income taxes can lead to dynamic scoring effects through the evolution of foreign debt. We show that a combination of tax-cumexpenditure, or government expenditure alone can balance the long term government budget constraint. However, for certain combinations of parameter values, the capital income tax alone cannot balance the intertemporal budget.;
Arrested development: the experience of European hard disk drive firms in comparison with US and Japanese firms

This paper analyses how US, Japanese, and European HDD firms responded to technological shifts in the hard disk industry from 1973 through 1996. Leading incumbent US HDD firms were frequently forced out of the market. Leading Japanese incumbent firms in the same industry, however, were not displaced by these changes. US startup firms thrived under these technological shifts, displacing US incumbent firms. Japanese startups did poorly. European firms encountered the worst of both worlds: its incumbent firms were frequently displaced by technological changes, as were US firms; while startup firms (with one exception) performed as poorly as those in Japan.
Market Structure and the Pricing of Electricity and Natural Gas

US Electricity and natural gas markets have traditionally been serviced by one of two market structures. In some markets, electricity and natural gas are sold by a regulated dual-product monopolist, while in other markets, electricity and natural gas are sold by separate regulated single-product monopolies. I analyze whether electricity and natural gas prices depend on the market structure and compare these results to the predictions of a number of theories. The results are most consistent with the political economy theories suggesting that regulators respond to interest group activity.
Tax Strategy Patents: Why the Tax Community Should Not Exclude the Patent System

A relatively recent phenomenon of patents covering tax saving strategies has generated an overwhelmingly negative response from the tax community. This Article reviews current patent laws in the context of tax strategy patents and business method patents (of which tax strategy patents are a subset), and then analyzes the major concerns voiced by opponents of tax strategy patents. The Article suggests that the lack of searchable prior art and patent examiner expertise are temporary problems that can and will be adequately addressed by the Patent Office and the tax community. In addition, while the tax community has put forth many thoughtful concerns regarding why tax strategies should be outside the realm of patentable subject matter, this Article contends that many of the concerns arise from either a misunderstanding of the patent laws, or dislike and fear of change, rather than from fundamental reasons to exclude tax strategies from patenting. The Article does, however, recommend some slight changes to the laws relevant to this area, including e requiring patent applicants to base tax strategy patent applications on current tax laws, and to identify and explain the primary tax laws relevant to an alleged invention, * reviewing all tax strategy patents under a strict obviousness standard based on the recent KSR v. Teleflex Supreme Court case, and 0 amending the tax laws to make the use of patented tax strategies reportable transactions. Minimizing the issuance of "bad" tax strategy patents will result in a patent system whose value to the public correlates with the value of the tax planning profession as a whole. Thus, interested parties should focus their efforts not on eliminating tax strategy patents, but on increasing the quality of issued patents and improving the tax laws under which any such patents would operate. [Vol. 18.2 HeinOnline -18 Alb. L.J. Sci. & Tech. 326 2008 TAX STRATEGY PATENTS
The Ethics of Nudging

This essay defends the following propositions. (1) It is pointless to object to choice architecture or nudging as such. Choice architecture cannot be avoided. Nature itself nudges; so does the weather; so do spontaneous orders and invisible hands. The private sector inevitably nudges, as does the government. It is reasonable to object to particular nudges, but not to nudging in general. (2) In this context, ethical abstractions (for example, about autonomy, dignity, and manipulation) can create serious confusion. To make progress, those abstractions must be brought into contact with concrete practices. Nudging and choice architecture take diverse forms, and the force of an ethical objection depends on the specific form. (3) If welfare is our guide, much nudging is actually required on ethical grounds. (4) If autonomy is our guide, much nudging is also required on ethical grounds. (5) Choice architecture should not, and need not, compromise either dignity or self-government, though imaginable forms could do both. (6) Some nudges are objectionable because the choice architect has illicit ends. When the ends are legitimate, and when nudges are fully transparent and subject to public scrutiny, a convincing ethical objection is less likely to be available. (7) There is, however, room for ethical objections in the case of well-motivated but manipulative interventions, certainly if people have not consented to them; such nudges can undermine autonomy and dignity. It follows that both the concept and the practice of manipulation deserve careful attention. The concept of manipulation has a core and a periphery; some interventions fit within the core, others within the periphery, and others outside of both.
Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy Evaluating Alternative Indices

A comprehensive and integrated framework for the analysis of data is offered and used to assess data sets on democracy. The framework first distinguishes among three challenges that are sequentially addressed: conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation. In turn, it specifies distinct tasks associated with these challenges and the standards of assessment that pertain to each task. This framework is applied to the data sets on democracy most frequently used in current statistical research, generating a systematic evaluation of these data sets. The authors’ conclusion is that constructors of democracy indices tend to be quite self-conscious about methodological issues but that even the best indices suffer from important weaknesses. More constructively, the article’s assessment of existing data sets on democracy identifies distinct areas in which attempts to improve the quality of data on democracy might fruitfully be focused.
When Do Governance Mechanisms Matter Most

We examine the interaction of internal and external firm-level governance mechanisms with industry-specific economic conditions to assess when they best serve current shareholders. We find that ext...
The Timing of Earnings Announcements: An Examination of the Strategic Disclosure Hypothesis

ABSTRACT: Beginning with Patell and Wolfson (1982), several papers have documented that earnings announcements made after the market closes and/or on Fridays tend to contain worse earnings news than those made at other times. One hypothesis is that opportunistic managers release earnings at these times of decreased media attention to “hide” their bad news and reduce the associated market penalty. Using firm‐level tests that focus on only those firms that switch their disclosure timing (rather than consistently report at the same time), we find no evidence that managers opportunistically report worse news after the market closes or on Fridays. We then explore other determinants of the timing decision, including the more benign hypothesis that managers with worse earnings news release earnings after the market closes to more broadly disseminate the information. Consistent with desiring more time for the market to assimilate the announcement, we find some evidence that more complex firms tend to announce ear...
Eligibility Recertification and Dynamic Opt-in Incentives in Income-tested Social Programs: Evidence from Medicaid/CHIP

Conventional labor supply studies assume constant eligibility monitoring of incometested program participants, but this is not true for most programs. For example, states can allow children to enroll in Medicaid/CHIP for 12 months regardless of family income changes. A long recertification period reduces monitoring costs but is predicted to induce program participation by temporary income adjustments. However, I find little evidence of strategic behavior from the 2001 and 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Given the lack of dynamic responses, I propose a framework to compute the optimal recertification period and find 12 months to be its lower bound.
Are share price levels informative? Evidence from the ownership, pricing, turnover and performance of IPO firms

Abstract We ask whether a firm's choice of IPO price is informative in the sense that it relates systematically to the firm's other choices and characteristics. We find that both institutional ownership and underwriter reputation increases monotonically with the chosen IPO price level. We also find that the relationship between IPO price and underpricing is U-shaped. In contrast, post-IPO turnover displays an inverted U-shaped relation to IPO price. Moreover, firms choosing a higher (lower) stock price level experience lower (higher) mortality rates. Our results are robust to controls for market liquidity and firm size, and for partial adjustment of IPO prices based on pre-market information.
Discovering “Immployment” Law: The Constitutionality of Subfederal Immigration Regulation at Work

Excerpt] This Article develops two general preemption frameworks that feature federal employment law. It first devises and applies an implied-preemption analysis of subfederal employer-sanctions laws based on the preemptive force of FLSA and Title VII. In doing so, this Article reveals that the four subfederal employersanctions laws that have produced conflicting court decisions are unconstitutional because they stand as obstacles to fundamental policies underlying FLSA and Title VII. Specifically, these four subfederal laws, along with other subfederal laws that share their qualities, conflict with core federal employment policy goals of protecting employees from employment discrimination and encouraging valid employee-initiated complaints from marginalized workers for the benefit of employees more broadly. Second, this Article develops a hybrid preemption framework that simultaneously considers the policy goals of federal immigration law and federal employment law. This new hybrid framework highlights an additional theory for preemption of these subfederal employer-sanctions laws. This Article’s analytical focus on legal theories for preemption of subfederal employer-sanctions also indirectly exposes a number of policy tensions between workplace-based immigration regulation and federal workplace protections more generally.
Sticky Information versus Sticky Prices: A Proposal to Replace the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

This paper examines a model of dynamic price adjustment based on the assumption that information disseminates slowly throughout the population. Compared with the commonly used sticky-price model, this sticky-information model displays three related properties that are more consistent with accepted views about the effects of monetary policy. First, disine ations are always contractionary (although announced disine ations are less contractionary than surprise ones). Second, monetary policy shocks have their maximum impact on ine ation with a substantial delay. Third, the change in ine ation is positively correlated with the level of economic activity. The dynamic effects of aggregate demand on output and ine ation remain a theoretical puzzle for macroeconomists. In recent years, much of the literature on this topic has used a model of time-contingent price adjustment. This model, often called “ the new Keynesian Phillips curve,” builds on the work of Taylor [1980], Rotemberg [1982], and Calvo [1983]. As the recent survey by Clarida, Gali, and Gertler [1999] illustrates, this model is widely used in theoretical analysis of monetary policy. McCallum [1997] has called it “ the closest thing there is to a standard specie cation.” Yet there is growing awareness that this model is hard to square with the facts. Ball [1994a] shows that the model yields the surprising result that announced, credible disine ations cause booms rather than recessions. Fuhrer and Moore [1995] argue that it cannot explain why ine ation is so persistent. Mankiw [2001] notes that it has trouble explaining why shocks to monetary policy have a delayed and gradual effect on ine ation. These problems appear to arise from the same source: although the price level is sticky in this model, the ine ation rate can change quickly. By contrast, empirical analyses of the ine ation process (e.g., Gordon [1997]) typically give a large role to “ ine ation inertia.”
SIX2 and SIX3 coordinately regulate functional maturity and fate of human pancreatic β cells

The physiological functions of many vital tissues and organs continue to mature after birth, but the genetic mechanisms governing this postnatal maturation remain an unsolved mystery. Human pancreatic β cells produce and secrete insulin in response to physiological cues like glucose, and these hallmark functions improve in the years after birth. This coincides with expression of the transcription factors SIX2 and SIX3, whose functions in native human β cells remain unknown. Here, we show that shRNA-mediated SIX2 or SIX3 suppression in human pancreatic adult islets impairs insulin secretion. However, transcriptome studies revealed that SIX2 and SIX3 regulate distinct targets. Loss of SIX2 markedly impaired expression of genes governing β-cell insulin processing and output, glucose sensing, and electrophysiology, while SIX3 loss led to inappropriate expression of genes normally expressed in fetal β cells, adult α cells, and other non-β cells. Chromatin accessibility studies identified genes directly regulated by SIX2. Moreover, β cells from diabetic humans with impaired insulin secretion also had reduced SIX2 transcript levels. Revealing how SIX2 and SIX3 govern functional maturation and maintain developmental fate in native human β cells should advance β-cell replacement and other therapeutic strategies for diabetes.
Strongmen and Straw Men: Authoritarian Regimes and the Initiation of International Conflict

How do domestic institutions affect autocratic leaders’ decisions to initiate military conflicts? Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I argue that institutions in some kinds of dictatorships allow regime insiders to hold leaders accountable for their foreign policy decisions. However, the preferences and perceptions of these autocratic domestic audiences vary, with domestic audiences in civilian regimes being more skeptical of using military force than the military officers who form the core constituency in military juntas. In personalist regimes in which there is no effective domestic audience, no predictable mechanism exists for restraining or removing overly belligerent leaders, and leaders tend to be selected for personal characteristics that make them more likely to use military force. I combine these arguments to generate a series of hypotheses about the conflict behavior of autocracies and test the hypotheses using new measures of authoritarian regime type. The findings indicate that, despite the conventional focus on differences between democracies and nondemocracies, substantial variation in conflict initiation occurs among authoritarian regimes. Moreover, civilian regimes with powerful elite audiences are no more belligerent overall than democracies. The result is a deeper understanding of the conflict behavior of autocracies, with important implications for scholars as well as policy makers.
Institutional Preconditions for Policy Success

Policy failures receive much attention from the public and from policy makers adjusting policy in response to failure. Yet, lessons learned from policy failures are necessarily ex post observations. Not only has the policy failed to achieve its purposes, but a great deal of political, institutional, temporal, and economic capital has been wasted. A new body of literature on policy success undertakes ex ante analysis of successful policy designs, instrument choices, and other policy-making variables to establish a framework for more effective policy making. Though policy success may be inhibited by a variety of procedural, programmatic, or political factors, institutional analysis — and specifically constitutional constraints on a government’s ability to craft certain policy instruments — has not yet been incorporated into the policy success and various other policy studies literatures. This Article is the first to undertake that integration and demonstrates how institutional analysis in earlier stages of the policy cycle can help society avoid constitutionally driven policy failures and move toward institutional policy successes. Only when this institutional precondition is achieved will the procedural, programmatic, and political components of a policy have an opportunity to succeed.
Truth in Government: Beyond the Tax Expenditure Budget

The tax expenditure budget recently has come under renewed attack. Some argue that its conceptual and implementational flaws justify discontinuing its publication. This paper points out the generality of these supposedly "fatal" flaws: all the sources of information we have about government spending suffer from problems similar if not identical to those identified in the tax expenditure budget. Take, for example, the absence of an agreed-upon baseline of a "normal" tax system against which to measure "tax expenditures." A central theme of the paper is that the same baseline problem exists for several clear substitutes for tax expenditures, regulation and the non-enforcement of across-the-board rules. Even the seemingly obvious baseline of zero expenditures for determining the amount of cash subsidies can be challenged as incompletely theorized and misleading. The breadth and depth of the baseline and other problems identified in the tax expenditure budget throw into question the wisdom of excoriating it in particular. If improving the utility of information distributed about the direction and function of government is the desired end, the paper contends, one must focus on the interaction between the various information sources rather than the merits or demerits of any particular source of information. And once we do that, the argument continues, it becomes clear that the better path involves the publication of more, rather than less, information. In particular, the paper contends that it would be helpful to publish an admittedly flawed regulatory budget to serve as a companion to the tax expenditure budget.
Drought and Public Necessity: Can a Common-Law “Stick” Increase Flexibility in Western Water Law?

Drought is a recurring — and likely increasing — challenge to water rights administration in western states under the prior appropriation doctrine, where “first in time” senior rights are often allocated to non-survival uses such as commercial agriculture rather than to drinking water supply for cities. While states and localities facing severe drought have used a variety of voluntary programs to re-allocate water, these programs by their very nature cannot guarantee that water will in fact be redistributed to the uses that best promote public health and community survival. Using the example of the Brazos River drought of 2010 to 2013, this Article explores the potential role of the common-law doctrine of public necessity in reallocating water during extreme drought. Building on my earlier work examining the potential use of public necessity in climate change adaptation for water law and coasts, this Article nevertheless focuses more narrowly on the specific issue of water crisis — the moment during an extreme drought when cities and power plants face a real inability to supply the general public with drinking water and electricity. At that moment, the doctrine of public necessity should allow state water agencies in western states to re-allocate water away from senior water rights holders whose water rights are for non-survival uses.
Purchase versus pooling in stock-for-stock acquisitions: Why do firms care?

Abstract We investigate firms’ choices between the purchase and pooling methods in stock-for-stock acquisitions. We find that in acquisitions with large step-ups to targets’ net assets, CEOs with earnings-based compensation are more likely to choose pooling and avoid the earnings ‘penalty’ associated with purchases. We find no association between stock-based compensation and the purchase–pooling choice, suggesting that managers are not concerned about implications of large step-ups for firms’ equity values. We also find that the likelihood of purchase increases with debt contracting costs, consistent with its favorable balance sheet effects, and with costs of qualifying for pooling, particularly the restriction of share repurchases.
How elastic is the government's demand for weapons?

Abstract We estimate the elasticity of the government's demand for specific weapons by econometric analysis of the relationship between quantity and cost revisions across the population of major weapon systems. The cost revisions are due in part to technological information generated in the course of research and development. The elasticity of demand is 0.55, and is significantly different from both zero and unity. Thus, the government's demand for specific weapons is inelastic, but not perfectly inelastic. Weapons acquisition is evidently characterized by increasing returns: the elasticity of total cost with respect to quantity is about 0.75.
Private information and insurance rejections

Across a wide set of nongroup insurance markets, applicants are rejected based on observable, often high-risk, characteristics. This paper argues that private information, held by the potential applicant pool, explains rejections. I formulate this argument by developing and testing a model in which agents may have private information about their risk. I first derive a new no-trade result that theoretically explains how private information could cause rejections. I then develop a new empirical methodology to test whether this no-trade condition can explain rejections. The methodology uses subjective probability elicitations as noisy measures of agents' beliefs. I apply this approach to three nongroup markets: long-term care, disability, and life insurance. Consistent with the predictions of the theory, in all three settings I find significant amounts of private information held by those who would be rejected; I find generally more private information for those who would be rejected relative to those who can purchase insurance, and I show it is enough private information to explain a complete absence of trade for those who would be rejected. The results suggest that private information prevents the existence of large segments of these three major insurance markets. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Imperfect price discrimination, market structure, and efficiency

. We introduce a flexible third-degree price discrimination framework by modeling the information firms possess about consumers’ locations (preferences) on the Salop circle as a partition. Higher information quality is translated into a partition refinement. In the limit, we obtain the perfect price discrimination paradigm. We show that the free-entry equilibrium number of firms exhibits a U-shape as a function of the quality of information. This implies that imperfect price discrimination generates the most efficient free-entry outcome. JEL classification: D43, L11, L43 Discrimination imparfaite par les prix, structure de marche et efficacite. Les auteurs produisent un cadre d’analyse flexible de la discrimination par les prix au troisieme degre en modelisant l’information que les firmes possedent a propos de la localisation (preferences) comme base de decoupage dans un cercle de Salop. Une plus grande qualite d’information se traduit par un decoupage plus fin. A la limite, on obtient le paradigme parfait de discrimination par les prix. On montre que le nombre de firmes en equilibre quand l’entree est libre est une fonction en forme de U dans son rapport avec la qualite de l’information. Cela implique que la discrimination imparfaite par les prix engendre le resultat le plus efficace quand l’entree est libre.
Is Proof of Statistical Significance Relevant

The classic treatises on evidence note that the court or jury must weigh the evidence, and upon weighing it, determine whether the plaintiff or the defendant prevails. Some courts, however, have indicated that statistical evidence should not be admitted unless it is subjected to a procedure known as 'hypothesis testing.' There are many rather mechanical procedures for performing these tests and a number of judges, attorneys, and law professors have suggested that hypothesis testing provides an objective, scientific means of settling disputed questions on which statistical evidence is brought to bear. Yet, many circumstances arise in which courts or administrators have puzzled over the meaning of hypothesis tests. This article examines the status of significance testing in litigation. It describes the case law on the need for the procedure, explains the nature and terminology of hypothesis testing as used in court, enumerates some of the problems that arise in these forensic applications, and pursues one such problem - that of selecting a 'significance level.' These sections show that explicit hypothesis testing is poorly suited for courtroom use. Statements as to what results are or are not 'statistically significant' should be inadmissible. The article also suggests the use of other statistical tools and terms that do not 'test' hypotheses but can better aid the finder of fact in judging the probative value of the statistical evidence. It is a plea to leave the task of decision to the trier of fact, and not to rely on superficially impressive methods whose seeming objectivity does not withstand analysis. It is a call for using, where suitable, those statistical tools that will aid these decisionmakers in the process if inference.
The Indispensable Role of the Mitigation Specialist in a Capital Case: A View from the Federal Bench

In noncapital cases, the jury determines guilt or innocence, and if the defendant is found guilty, the judge has the task of deciding the appropriate sentence. A judge does not, however, decide the penalty in a vacuum. In the federal system, a detailed Pre-Sentence Investigation report (“PSI”) is prepared in virtually all cases, including misdemeanors. The report is typically twenty or more pages long, single-spaced, and contains a comprehensive account of the defendant’s life history. Along with details of the offense and the defendant’s prior criminal record, it includes personal and family data, which discuss parents, siblings, their occupations and health, and their interactions with the defendant. The PSI recites the circumstances of the defendant’s upbringing, family support or lack thereof, and updated information from family members interviewed. It incorporates the defendant’s own marital and parental history and interviews with his or her spouse or former spouse and children. The report includes a section on the defendant’s physical condition, which recites everything from childhood
On Covert Quantum Sensing and the Benefits of Entanglement

Motivated by applications to covert quantum radar, we analyze a covert quantum sensing problem, in which a legitimate user aims at estimating an unknown parameter taking finitely many values by probing a quantum channel while remaining undetectable from an adversary receiving the probing signals through another quantum channel. When channels are classical-quantum, we characterize the optimal error exponent under a covertness constraint for sensing strategies in which probing signals do not depend on past observations. When the legitimate user’s channel is a unitary depending on the unknown parameter, we provide achievability and converse results that show how one can significantly improve covertness using an entangled input state.
Static adhesion hysteresis in elastic structures

Adhesive interactions between elastic structures such as graphene sheets, carbon nanotubes, and microtubules have been shown to exhibit hysteresis due to irrecoverable energy loss associated with bond breakage, even in static (rate-independent) experiments. To understand this phenomenon, we start with a minimal theory for the peeling of a thin sheet from a substrate, coupling the local event of bond breaking to the nonlocal elastic relaxation of the sheet and show that this can drive static adhesion hysteresis over a bonding/debonding cycle. Using this model we quantify hysteresis in terms of the adhesion and elasticity parameters of the system. This allows us to derive a scaling relation that preserves hysteresis at different levels of granularity while resolving a seeming paradox of lattice trapping in the continuum limit of a discrete fracture process. Finally, to verify our theory, we use new experiments to demonstrate and measure adhesion hysteresis in bundled microtubules.
Estimating Motion Codes from Demonstration Videos

A motion taxonomy can encode manipulations as a binary-encoded representation, which we refer to as motion codes. These motion codes innately represent a manipulation action in an embedded space that describes the motion’s mechanical features, including contact and trajectory type. The key advantage of using motion codes for embedding is that motions can be more appropriately defined with robotic-relevant features, and their distances can be more reasonably measured using these motion features. In this paper, we develop a deep learning pipeline to extract motion codes from demonstration videos in an unsupervised manner so that knowledge from these videos can be properly represented and used for robots. Our evaluations show that motion codes can be extracted from demonstrations of action in the EPIC-KITCHENS dataset.
Bicycle Exercise Ankle-Brachial Index Recovery Time as a Novel Metric for Evaluating the Hemodynamic Significance of External Iliac Endofibrosis in Competitive Cyclists

Subtle radiographic findings can increase the challenge of diagnosing external iliac artery endofibrosis. We evaluated a new metric, the bicycle exercise ankle brachial index recovery time (BART), in a cohort of cyclists with symptomatic external iliac artery endofibrosis. BART was defined as the time required in minutes for the ankle brachial index to return to 0.9 after a period of exercise. Surgical correction resulted in an improvement in BART postoperatively (4.5 ± 4.1 vs 9.1 ± 4.3 minutes; P < .001), with improved values correlating with better patient satisfaction. Documentation of the BARTs before and after surgical treatment provides an additional measure of postoperative hemodynamic improvement.
How Do Institutional Carriers Alleviate Normative and Cognitive Barriers to Regulatory Change

How do we reconcile misalignments between a system’s existing normative and cognitive elements and novel regulatory change? Prior work either largely focuses only on regulatory change or analyzes n...
Race/Ethnic Disparities in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Dementia: The Northern Manhattan Study

Background Variability in dementia rates across racial and ethnic groups has been estimated at 60% . Studies suggest disparities in Caribbean Hispanic and Black populations, but community-based data are limited. Objective Estimate the prevalence of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia in the racially and ethnically diverse community-based Northern Manhattan Study cohort and examine sociodemographic, vascular risk factor, and brain imaging correlates. Methods Cases of MCI and dementia were adjudicated by a team of neuropsychologists and neurologists and prevalence was estimated across race/ethnic groups. Ordinal proportional odds models were used to estimate race/ethnic differences in the prevalence of MCI or dementia adjusting for sociodemographic variables (model 1), model 1 plus potentially modifiable vascular risk factors (model 2), and model 1 plus structural imaging markers of brain integrity (model 3). Results There were 989 participants with cognitive outcome determinations (mean age 69±9 years; 68% Hispanic, 16% Black, 14% White; 62% women; mean (±SD) follow-up five (±0.6) years). Hispanic and Black participants had greater likelihood of MCI (20%) and dementia (5%) than White participants accounting for age and education differences. Hispanic participants had greater odds of MCI or dementia than both White and Black participants adjusting for sociodemographic variables, vascular risk factors, and brain imaging factors. White matter hyperintensity burden was significantly associated with greater odds of MCI or dementia (OR = 1.3, 1.1 to 1.6), but there was no significant interaction by race/ethnicity. Conclusion In this diverse community-based cohort, cross-sectional data revealed significant race/ethnic disparities in the prevalence of MCI and dementia. Longer follow-up and incidence data are needed to further clarify these relationships.
Cross Subspace Alignment Codes for Coded Distributed Batch Computation

The goal of coded distributed computation is to efficiently distribute a computation task, such as matrix multiplication, $N$ -linear computation, or multivariate polynomial evaluation, across $S$ servers through a coding scheme, such that the response from any $R$ servers ( $R$ is called the recovery threshold) is sufficient for the user to recover the desired computed value. Current state-of-art approaches are based on either exclusively matrix-partitioning (Entangled Polynomial (EP) Codes for matrix multiplication), or exclusively batch processing (Lagrange Coded Computing (LCC) for $N$ -linear computations or multivariate polynomial evaluations). We present three related classes of codes, based on the idea of Cross-Subspace Alignment (CSA) which was introduced originally in the context of secure and private information retrieval. CSA codes are characterized by a Cauchy-Vandermonde matrix structure that facilitates interference alignment along Vandermonde terms, while the desired computations remain resolvable along the Cauchy terms. These codes are shown to unify, generalize and improve upon the state-of-art codes for distributed computing. First we introduce CSA codes for matrix multiplication, which yield LCC codes as a special case, and are shown to outperform LCC codes in general in download-limited settings. While matrix-partitioning approaches (EP codes) for distributed matrix multiplication have the advantage of flexible server computation latency, batch processing approaches (CSA, LCC) have significant advantages in communication costs as well as encoding and decoding complexity per matrix multiplication. In order to combine the benefits of these approaches, we introduce Generalized CSA (GCSA) codes for matrix multiplication that bridge the extremes of matrix-partitioning and batch processing approaches and demonstrate synergistic gains due to cross subspace alignment. Finally, we introduce $N$ -CSA codes for $N$ -linear distributed batch computations and multivariate batch polynomial evaluations. $N$ -CSA codes include LCC codes as a special case, and are in general capable of outperforming LCC codes in download-constrained settings by upto a factor of $N$ . Generalizations of $N$ -CSA codes to include $X$ -secure data and $B$ -byzantine servers are also provided.
Minimax estimation of smooth optimal transport maps

Brenier’s theorem is a cornerstone of optimal transport that guarantees the existence of an optimal transport map T between two probability distributions P and Q over Rd under certain regularity conditions. The main goal of this work is to establish the minimax estimation rates for such a transport map from data sampled from P and Q under additional smoothness assumptions on T. To achieve this goal, we develop an estimator based on the minimization of an empirical version of the semidual optimal transport problem, restricted to truncated wavelet expansions. This estimator is shown to achieve near minimax optimality using new stability arguments for the semidual and a complementary minimax lower bound. Furthermore, we provide numerical experiments on synthetic data supporting our theoretical findings and highlighting the practical benefits of smoothness regularization. These are the first minimax estimation rates for transport maps in general dimension.
Two-Stage Augmentation and Adaptive CTC Fusion for Improved Robustness of Multi-Stream end-to-end ASR

Performance degradation of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system is commonly observed when the test acoustic condition is different from training. Hence, it is essential to make ASR systems robust against various environmental distortions, such as background noises and reverberations. In a multi-stream paradigm, improving robustness takes account of handling a variety of unseen single-stream conditions and inter-stream dynamics. Previously, a practical two-stage training strategy was proposed within multi-stream end-to-end ASR, where Stage-2 formulates the multi-stream model with features from Stage-1 Universal Feature Extractor (UFE). In this paper, as an extension, we introduce a two-stage augmentation scheme focusing on mismatch scenarios: Stage-1 Augmentation aims to address single-stream input varieties with data augmentation techniques; Stage-2 Time Masking applies temporal masks on UFE features of randomly selected streams to simulate diverse stream combinations. During inference, we also present adaptive Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) fusion with the help of hierarchical attention mechanisms. Experiments have been conducted on two datasets, DIRHA and AMI, as a multi-stream scenario. Compared with the previous training strategy, substantial improvements are reported with relative word error rate reductions of 29.7 − 59.3% across several unseen stream combinations.
Stochastic asset flow equations: Interdependence of trend and volatility

Abstract The complex interaction between the volatility and the price trend is examined. We model stochastic asset prices using the asset flow model with randomness arising directly from supply and demand. We show that the volatility is smallest at the extrema of the expected logarithm of the price. Linearizing the stochastic differential equation (SDE) about equilibrium, we obtain an exact relation for the autocovariance function, and relate it to the (3 by 3) Jacobian of the linearized SDE. In particular, we find the conditions under which one has a pair of complex conjugate eigenvalues of the Jacobian resulting in oscillations. The frequency of the oscillations depends only on the imaginary part of the complex pair, while the decay rate depends only on the real eigenvalue and the real parts of the complex pair. For the deterministic system, oscillations typically decay rapidly. However, randomness induces oscillations to continue indefinitely with a frequency that depends on the parameters of the deterministic system. The computations and analytical results presented here demonstrate that volatility increases when traders place greater emphasis on trend, confirming a generally held belief among practitioners.