Media competition and information disclosure

This paper analyzes an election game where self-interested politicians can exploit the lack of information that citizens have about candidates’ preferred policies in order to pursue their own agendas. In such a setup, we analyze the incentives of newspapers to acquire costly information and that of politicians to make informative speeches, as well as how competition among the media affects such incentives. We show that the higher the number of potential readers and/or the lower the cost of investigating, the more the candidates tend to reveal their motives. We also show that the readers’ purchasing habits play a crucial role in the model. More specifically, we show that if readers always buy a newspaper, media competition favors information disclosure; whereas if they are opportunistic and just buy a newspaper in case news are uncovered, competition is not so desirable. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Optimal voting rules for two-member tenure committees

A tenure committee first votes on whether to hire a candidate; if it does, it receives an informative performance signal, and then votes on whether to tenure the candidate; rejection at either stage returns the committee to a candidate pool, endogenising the value of the outside option. A candidate’s fate depends only on the behaviour of two ‘weather-vane’ committee members. Committee members may vote against favoured candidates if the weather-vane is opposed; enthusiastic assessments by one of these weather-vanes may harm a candidate’s chances by increasing others’ thresholds for hiring him; sunk time costs may lead voters who voted against hiring to vote for tenuring him, even after a poor probationary performance. For two member committees that are patient and perceptive, the optimal voting rule is a (weak) majority at the hiring stage and unanimity at the tenure stage; when such committees are impatient or imperceptive, the double (weak) majority rule is optimal. Perversely, the performance of a patient, imperceptive committee improves as its perceptiveness further declines. Consistent with practice, falling threshold rules are not optimal. Results on optimal voting rules are also presented in limit cases as committee members’ beliefs become more correlated. Finally, we compare the model to a discrete-time European options model.     

Utilitarianism and discrimination

Since Becker (1971), a common argument against asymmetric norms that promote minority rights over those of the majority is that such policies reduce total welfare. While this may be the case, we show that there are simple environments where aggregate sum of individual utilities is actually maximized under asymmetric norms that favor minorities. We thus maintain that without information regarding individual utilities one cannot reject or promote segregation-related policies based on utilitarian arguments.     

Perceptions of College and University Presidents Regarding Tobacco-Free Campus Policies

Abstract

Objective: To identify college presidents’ support for tobacco-free campus policies (TFCP), perceived barriers and benefits to implementing such policies, and activities that might initiate policy adoption. Participants: Participants were 405 presidents (51% of 796 delivered surveys) from a national sample of eligible 4-year institutions in summer 2012. Methods: A 4-page, 24-item cross-sectional questionnaire was mailed to potential participants in 4 waves to maximize the response rate. Results: The vast majority of presidents support TFCP (84%) and believed they should play a key role in establishing TFCP (80%). A majority agreed advocacy by campus groups was necessary to establishing TFCP. Presidents with an existing policy were twice as likely to believe advocacy was necessary for policy establishment. Presidents most commonly selected creating policy drafts and designating a committee as important to initiating TFCP. Conclusion: Advocates would benefit from focusing on presidential involvement and solutions to personnel barriers in establishing TFCP.     

Egalitarianism and utilitarianism in committees of representatives

We consider a committee of representatives that makes dichotomous choices (acceptance/rejection) by vote. Given the size of each group represented, what is the most adequate voting rule for the committee? We provide answers based on each of the two principles commonly used to make normative assessments in different contexts: egalitarianism and utilitarianism. To that end, we introduce utilities into the model and adopt a normative approach.     

Committees with Farsighted Voters: A New Interpretation of Stable Sets

The interpretation of von Neumann–Morgenstern stable sets in voting games has been debated by most political scientists. The present paper addresses the issue in a model that consists of an infinite sequence of repetitions of the standard committee game. The analysis of equilibrium processes leads to the following conclusion: when voters are farsighted, an alternative is the limit of an absorbing equilibrium process if and only if it belongs to some stable set of the underlying committee game. While the traditional interpretation of the core implicitly assumes myopic voters, we also demonstrate that the core of a strong committee is the unique limit of all absorbing equilibrium processes, provided that voters are arbitrarily patient. We finally proceed to an analysis of the Condorcet Paradox in this dynamic context.     

Search online: Evidence from acquisition of information on online job boards and resume banks

While online job boards and resume banks have improved access to information about available jobs and job searchers, little is known about how much of this information gets actually disseminated among participants in the labor market. On the basis of novel data, we find that employers and job searchers prefer to visit resume banks and job boards with more postings. However, once on the site, the number of postings that a typical visitor reviews is not affected by the number of available postings and represents a small fraction of all postings on the site. These findings suggest that employers and job searchers acquire limited amount of information about available job searchers and jobs online even though additional information is easily accessible and available free of charge.     

Substitute-care information systems under public law 96-272

This paper reports on the results of a survey of state responses to the requirements of Public Law 96-272, including the use of permanency planning and periodic review techniques in substitutecare services, and, in particular, the nature and scope of information systems developed to monitor these services. Officials from 44 states and the District of Columbia completed the survey.All respondents reported having implemented statewide policies requiring permanency planning for and periodic review of all substitute-care cases. Those surveyed also indicated strongly favorable attitudes toward these policies among both administrators and direct-service personnel.A large majority (85%) of responding states had developed automated information systems for substitute care, most in the form of a central, statewide data base. Only four states reported depending solely on manual record keeping. The computer systems were most frequently used for administrative applications such as generating aggregate reports, monitoring case reviews, and coordinating caseloads. Applications least commonly reported included reducing narrative recording, determining placement availability, and linking clients to resources, activities more common to direct services. Finally, results of a set of attitudinal questions indicated support for the use of automated data management and the belief that it is a necessary technology, but many respondents also noted that automation has engendered complaints and opposition from staff members in field settings.     

Qui recrute et comment ? L’expertise économique des professionnels de l’insertion des jeunes

How do job placement specialists acquire knowledge of the markets, and do they put it to use? At deliberative committee meetings on the funding of youth integration projects, we observed the construction of a shared representation of the workings of local-level job markets. Integration professionals develop their economic expertise primarily from two sources to which they are professionally close: the young jobseekers themselves and the vocational training professionals. The unequal distribution of economic expertise is intensified by structural differences in the capacity to put it to use for each of the deliberative stakeholders.     

Digital Europe 1998: Policies,Technological development and implementation of the emerging information Society

The article provides an overview over European policies designed systematically to push and implement the European information society. It looks at their rationales and points out critical areas and their potential impact on the individual as well as democratic society. In addition, comparisons are made within the triad Europe‐US‐Japan to show the global perspective of information society policies and actions. The wealth of usually enthusiastic documents that the European Commission and related actors issue with regard to the information society clearly indicates the priority that policy makers give to the information society. However, scepticism is still called for in terms of unsolved problems. The pace of solutions and the pace of technology are at times at odds. Even if the policy trail shows that attention is increasingly paid to users and citizens, it remains to be seen how the actual impact of the inevitable information society will match the needs of its users in the most productive way.     

Public information and social choice

We examine the value of public information when a society uses a social choice rule to decide among a set of outcomes. We require that a social choice function satisfies unrestricted domain, non-decisiveness and the Pareto principle. We show that there exist payoff structures for every social choice function, such that an arbitrary subset of voters is worse off by public information. We apply the proposition to collective information acquisition and to irreversible investments. Received: 2 June 1997/Accepted: 30 September 1998     

Knowledge gap effects in a health information campaign

The evaluation of a campaign to increase cardiovascular health knowledge indicates that within the treatment community, education was a significant predictor of knowledge before the campaign but was not a significant predictor after the campaign. Two variables related to motivation to acquire information about cardiovascular health (age and perceived threat of heart attack) were not significant predictors of knowledge before the campaign but were significant predictors afterwards. These results suggest that the infusion of information into a social system via the mass media can close as well as open knowledge gaps and that motivation to acquire information in a specific knowledge domain is a factor controlling gap effects.     

Modeling the dynamism of HIV information diffusion in multiplex networks of homeless youth

Cascade and threshold models are widely used to predict information diffusion in social networks, yet their characterization of networks as static and monoplex limit their ability to accurately predict how information propagates in dynamic, multiplex social environments. Using data from a peer-led HIV prevention intervention for homeless youth, we determine whether manipulating the baseline social network by (1) adding ties observed at later time points, and (2) accounting for alternative relational contexts improves each model’s predictive accuracy. Results show that the addition of new ties improves the performance of both models, while substituting the context of interaction yields only minor improvements.     

Public Policy and Poverty Among the Oldest Old

In neglecting to acknowledge the heterogeneity of our aging population, we encourage policies that meet the needs of the majority of older people but discount the needs of those characterized by lifelong poverty. The overall economic well-being of the "oldest old," historically the poorer cohort among the age%: is anticipated to improve over the next 50 years. This improvement will increase the economic gap between the majority of the aged and a minority who will carry their existing poverty into old age. Economic protection for the "always-poor" can be improved and intergenerational stress reduced if we identify now those with a high probability of poverty in old age and develop policies in the 1990s aimed at meeting their future needs.     

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS, CONSTITUENT PREFERENCES, AND CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

We model the behavior of a vote-maximizing legislator in order to predict interest group campaign contributions to incumbent politicians. We show that committee assignments and voter preferences affect the price a legislator requires to produce policies for any interest group. An econometric analysis of actual interest group contributions shows that these groups make significantly larger contributions to legislators on committees with jurisdiction over especially relevant policy issues and to incumbents with non-hostile constituencies. These results support our theory; interest groups act as if committees matter in the determination of policy and voters' interests constrain interest group behavior.     

Mobilizing intercultural education for equity and social justice. Time to react against the intolerable: A proposal from Spain

Abstract

Education is suffering from the consequences of strengthening neoliberal policies, which impose an education model that serves the interests of the hegemonic economic system. The market rationale is being implemented in schools, moving the interests from equity to efficiency, from equal opportunities to performance. Starting from setting out a panoramic view of the way in which the intercultural focus in Spain has been used, with an approach to the different educational spheres in which we have carried out our work and research –educational policies, teacher education, school practice and education outside the school – we discuss the paradoxes and ambiguities that remove the transformative capacity of intercultural education and propose the reformulation of interculturality as an ethical and political project to subvert inequality by mobilizing to collectively create and enable images of education that contribute to a sustained way of building an equitable and fair society. Assuming our role as academics, we design a specific collective proposal on who mobilizes, with whom, as well as the attributes of the processes to be generated are discussed as well.     

Affinity Paths and information diffusion in social networks

Widespread interest in the diffusion of information through social networks has produced a large number of Social Dynamics models. A majority of them use theoretical hypothesis to explain their diffusion mechanisms while the few empirically based ones average out their measures over many messages of different contents. Our empirical research tracking the step-by-step email propagation of an invariable viral marketing message delves into the content impact and has discovered new and striking features. The topology and dynamics of the propagation cascades display patterns not inherited from the email networks carrying the message. Their disconnected, low transitivity, tree-like cascades present positive correlation between their nodes probability to forward the message and the average number of neighbors they target and show increased participants’ involvement as the propagation paths length grows. Such patterns not described before, nor replicated by any of the existing models of information diffusion, can be explained if participants make their pass-along decisions based uniquely on local knowledge of their network neighbors affinity with the message content. We prove the plausibility of such mechanism through a stylized, agent-based model that replicates the Affinity Paths observed in real information diffusion cascades.     

MARCH MADNESS? UNDERREACTION TO HOT AND COLD HANDS IN NCAA BASKETBALL

The hot hand bias is the widely documented bias toward overestimation of positive serial correlation in sequential events. We test for the hot hand bias in a novel real‐world context, the seeding of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament teams. That is, we examine whether teams that perform relatively well heading into “March Madness” are seeded too high, and/or teams with poor recent performance are seeded too low. The seeds are determined by a 10‐member committee that only has implicit incentives, but these incentives are still substantial as the committee's decisions are highly scrutinized by the media, fans, and other stakeholders. We find that, contra the hot hand bias, the committee underreacts to signals of momentum heading into the NCAA tournament. Various results indicate this behavior can be attributed to both: (1) inattention to relatively detailed information indicating momentum; and (2) under‐appreciation of the predictive value of this information. Betting markets incorporate this information efficiently, but neglect some additional information that is predictive of winning NCAA tournament games but not of beating the spread. We note that the NCAA tournament has been highly popular and lucrative partly due to the “madness” (high frequency of wins by lower‐seeded teams), which the bias we document contributes to, making the persistence of bias less surprising. (JEL D83, L83)     

Rules for aggregating information

We present a model of information aggregation in which agents’ information is represented through partitions over states of the world. We discuss three axioms, meet separability, upper unanimity, and non-imposition, and show that these three axioms characterize the class of oligarchic rules, which combine all of the information held by a pre-specified set of individuals.     

A theory of voting patterns and performance in private and public committees

We compare play in private and public committees when insiders care both about how well the committee decision serves organizational goals, and about the rewards which outsiders give for representing their interests. We show that a private committee reaches decisions which better serve organizational goals than either a public committee or the median insider choosing alone; and that a committee can only exhibit a norm of consensus if insiders vote in private. Finally, any insider who does not vote for a private committee’s decision must vote for a decision which better serves organizational goals; whereas a dissident in a public committee votes for a decision which worse serves organizational goals.