Equity and effectiveness of optimal taxation in contests under an all-pay auction

The means of contest design may include differential taxation of the prize. This paper considers all-pay auctions under complete information and establishes that, given a revenue-maximizing contest designer who faces a balanced-budget constraint, the optimal taxation scheme corresponding to an all-pay auction is appealing in two senses. First, it ensures extreme equitable final prize valuations. Second, it is effective; it yields total contestants’ efforts that are larger than those obtained under almost any pure-strategy equilibrium of a Tullock-type lottery contest.     

A formula for determining social worker positions based upon the Pardes method

An alternative approach to traditionalad hoc methods of determining social worker positions is presented. It is based upon the collection of objective data and their inclusion in a mathematical formula. This apprach assures the employment of identical criteria and administrative procedures for the assignment of social workers' positions. It guarantees that for a given number of social work bureaux the assignment is equitable. The particular example presented is that of regional councils in Israel. The formula includes the variables: number of residents within each council's jurisdiction, and of community distress and distance travelled by social workers between the settlements of a council.     

Two stage multiple comparison procedures based on the studentized range

Stein’s (1945) two sample approach and Tukey’s T-Method of multiple comparisons (see e.g. Miller, 1966, Ch. 2) are combined to obtain fixed width simultaneous confidence intervals and simultaneous test procedures of predetermined Type I and Type II error levels, for all contrasts, in a one way layout. The necessary constants for implementing the two stage procedure are obtained under a least favorable configuration of the parameters. This provides the required protection of the null and alternative hypotheses under any configuration of parameters. A table is provided for some selected designs and error levels and an example is given to illustrate certain features of the new procedure.     

SFX Miscellaneous Free Ejournals Target: Usage Survey Among the SFX Community

The number of free or open access articles is increasing rapidly, and their retrieval with library indexes and OpenURL link resolvers has been a challenge. In June 2014, the SFX MISCELLANEOUS_FREE_EJOURNALS target contained more than 24,000 portfolios of all kinds. The SFX KnowledgeBase Advisory Board (KBAB) carried out an international survey to get an overview of the usage of this target by the SFX community and to precisely identify what could be done to improve it. The target is widely used among the community. However, many respondents complained about three major problems: (a) incorrect links, (b) full texts actually not free, and (c) incorrect or missing thresholds (years and volumes information).     

Who gains from information asymmetry?

This article considers an asymmetric contest with incomplete information. There are two types of players: informed and uninformed. Each player has a different ability to translate effort into performance in terms of the contest success function. While one player’s type is known to both players, the other is private information and known only to the player himself. We compare the Bayesian Nash equilibrium outcome of a one-sided private information contest to the Nash equilibrium with no private information, in which both players know the type of the other player. We show conditions under which uncertainty increases the investment of the uninformed player and the rent dissipation of the contest, while decreasing the expected net payoff of the informed player. In addition, we consider conditions under which the informed player—before knowing his own type—prefers that the uninformed player knows his type. Moreover, we show conditions for the existence/non-existence of equilibrium in a two-stage contest in which the informed player declares his type (or does not declare) in the first stage and in the second stage the two players play according to the information available to them.     

On the variance estimate of a wilcoxon-mann whitney statistic for group ordered data

Two consistent estimators for the non-null variance of Wil-coxon-Mann-Whitney’s statistic applied to grouped ordered data, are considered. The first is based on U-statistics and the sec-ond is obtained by the Delta method. Some examples are given to demonstrate the extent of error when using a null variance esti-mate for constructing confidence intervals. It appears that the two consistent estimates are very close, but may both be disting-uishably larger or smaller than the null variance estimate.     

Optimal designs for the development of personalized treatment rules

We study the design of multi-armed parallel group clinical trials to estimate personalized treatment rules that identify the best treatment for a given patient with given covariates. Assuming that the outcomes in each treatment arm are given by a homoscedastic linear model, with possibly different variances between treatment arms, and that the trial subjects form a random sample from an unselected overall population, we optimize the (possibly randomized) treatment allocation allowing the allocation rates to depend on the covariates. We find that, for the case of two treatments, the approximately optimal allocation rule does not depend on the value of the covariates but only on the variances of the responses. In contrast, for the case of three treatments or more, the optimal treatment allocation does depend on the values of the covariates as well as the true regression coefficients. The methods are illustrated with a recently published dietary clinical trial.     

Evaluating the performance capability of a multi-organization system

A model for evaluating the performance capability of a multi-organization system is introduced. The model is based on hierarchical-modular decomposition of the components which determine system performance up to the level where they can be measured quantitatively, or at least qualitatively, in an objective or subjective manner. Performance measures are obtained by incorporating these components into multi-attribute evaluation functions. The model provides decision makers with a tool for quantitative assessment of performance, identification of bottlenecks, a framework for ‘what-if’ simulation and a mean for conflict resolution during planning. Application of the model to the Israeli Water Resources Development System provides an illustrative example.