Limiting median lines do not suffice to determine the yolk

The yolk, an important concept in the spatial model of voting, is defined in two dimensions as the smallest circle intersecting all median lines. In the literature one finds the assumption that the limiting median lines, i.e., those that pass through two voter ideal points, suffice to determine the yolk. Counterex-amples are given here which invalidate this assumption.This work was done while the second author held a Research Associateship from the National Research Council at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, ECS-8451032.     

The computational difficulty of manipulating an election

We show how computational complexity might protect the integrity of social choice. We exhibit a voting rule that efficiently computes winners but is computationally resistant to strategic manipulation. It is NP-complete for a manipulative voter to determine how to exploit knowledge of the preferences of others. In contrast, many standard voting schemes can be manipulated with only polynomial computational effort.Presented at Purdue University, March 1987; at the University of Arizona, April 1987; at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 1987; at Yale University, November 1987; at Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques, Marseille-Luminy, April 1988. This research was supported in part by Presidential Young Investigator Awards from the National Science Foundation to the first two authors (ECS-8351313 and ECS-8451032), and by grant N00014-86-K-0173 from the Office of Naval Research.The authors appreciate many helpful comments and suggestions by the editor and three anonymous referees. We also thank Michel Balinski, Salvador Barbera, Jean-Pierre Barthelemy, and Peyton Young for stimulating discussions.     

Voting schemes for which it can be difficult to tell who won the election

We show that a voting scheme suggested by Lewis Carroll can be impractical in that it can be computationally prohibitive (specifically, NP-hard) to determine whether any particular candidate has won an election. We also suggest a class of impracticality theorems which say that any fair voting scheme must, in the worst-case, require excessive computation to determine a winner.Presented at Purdue University, March 1987; at the University of Arizona, April 1987; at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 1987; at Yale University, November 1987; at Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques, Marseille-Luminy, April 1988. This research was supported in part by Presidential Young Investigator Awards from the National Science Foundation to the first two authors (ECS-8351313 and ECS-8451032), and by grant N00014-86-K-0173 from the Office of Naval Research.The authors thank the editor and three anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions.     

The judgment of rapport: A cross-cultural comparison between Americans and Greeks

Interpersonal perception was examined cross-culturally by having samples of Greek and American subjects view and judge the level of rapport throughout the same series of 50 dyadic interactions recorded in America. The overall pattern of results showed that: (a) the judgment policies and accuracy of the Greek and American samples were remarkably similar; (b) both groups fell far short of the agreement level possible for this task; and (c) the low levels of achievement were a consequence of both groups giving insufficient weight to valid behavioral predictors of rapport while relying on the apparently compelling but invalid cues, smiling and expressivity. Both the Greeks and Americans, it appears, have widely shared implicit theories or policies regarding which observable (i.e., nonverbal) aspects of an interaction indicate its positivity; these implicit policies are remarkably similar and they are imperfect.This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Young Investigator grant to the first author.     

Condorcet's jury theorem in light of de Finetti's theorem

This paper generalizes Condorcet's jury theorem to the case of symmetrically dependent votes with the help of de Finetti's theorem. Thus, the paper relaxes Condorcet's assumption of independent voting while preserving his main result: In jury-type situations a majority of voters is more likely than any single voter to choose the better of two alternatives.I am indebted to Professors Steven Brams, Arnold Buss, Gary Miller and Norman Schofield for their comments and questions. This paper is supported, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-9210800).     

The structure of neutral monotonic social functions

In this paper, we show that neutral monotonic social functions and their specializations to social decision functions, quasi-transitive social decision functions, and social welfare functions can be uniquely represented as a collection of overlapping simple games, each of which is defined on a nonempty set of concerned individuals. Moreover, each simple game satisfies certain intersection conditions depending on the number of social alternatives; the number of individuals belonging to the concerned set under consideration; and the collective rationaly assumption.This is a revision of Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper 485, March 1978, to be published in Social Choice and Welfare in memory of Julian H. Blau.This research was originally supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant and a Yale University Senior Faculty Fellowship.     

Relationship admitting families of candidates

A central theme in social choice is to determine when must there be a relationship among a group's sincere election rankings of several different subsets of candidates. This issue is completely resolved here for positional voting methods. Namely, necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for a family of subsets of candidates to determine when there is a choice of positional voting methods so that there are relationships among the election rankings. The same issue is resolved for a related family of social choice mappings. Then, in part, these necessary and sufficient conditions are used i) to analyze sequential voting procedures, ii) to show how to create new classes of axiomatic representations for social choice mappings that uniquely characterize the Borda Count, and iii) to determine the limits of indeterminacy for positional voting election outcomes.This research was supported in part by NSF grant IRI-8803505 and a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.     

Endogenous agenda formation in three-person committees

This paper analyzes a 3-person voting game in which two or three players have the ability to choose alternatives to be considered. Once the set of possible alternatives and the structure of the voting procedure are known, the players can solve for the outcome. Thus, the actual choice over outcomes takes place in the choice of alternatives to be voted on, i.e., the agenda. An equilibrium to this agenda-formation game in shown to exist under different assumptions about the information relative to the order of the players in the voting game. Further, this equilibrium is computed and found to possess certain features which are attractive from a normative point of view.Prepared for delivery at the 1985 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, The New Orleans Hilton, August 29–September 1, 1985. We would like to thank Richard McKelvey, Norman Schofield and two anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions. We retain responsibility for remaining errors.     

Structural equation model for the evaluation of national funding on R&D project of SMEs in consideration with MBNQA criteria

Financial support on the R&D in Science & Technology for SMEs at the governmental level plays a crucial role on the improvement of the national competitiveness. Korea Science & Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) has supported the R&D projects of SMEs with the competitive technology ability by way of the Science and Technology Promotion Fund. In this paper, we propose a structural equation model (SEM) to evaluate the performance of such a funding program in terms of three aspects: output, outcome and impact under given funding inputs, R&D environment of a recipient company, and external evaluation programs of funding organization. We adopt Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) criteria to assess the R&D environmental factors of recipient companies. In addition, we test the effect of interim evaluation of the funded project. The proposed model is applied to the real case and is used to identify the best practices as well as to provide feedback information for the improvement of the government funding programs of the R&D projects of SMEs.     

Nonverbal behavior and gender as determinants of physical attractiveness

We investigated the combined and interacting effects of positivity, dominance, sex, and three nonverbal channels on the perception of physical attractiveness. We found that positive affects were rated as more attractive than negative affects regardless of the channel (face and voice, as well as body). We also found that physical attractiveness in females appeared to be a function of the face and body combined, whereas for males it appeared more to be a function of the face alone.Preparation of this paper was supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Spencer Foundation. The content of this report is solely the responsibility of the authors. The paper is based on the first author's senior honors thesis, written under the supervision of the third author, and submitted to the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. The authors wish to thank Louis Elson, Cecil Quillen, David McCreery, Bill Duryea, Suzanne Kemple, Steve Love, Frank Bernieri, Monica Harris, Poppy McLeod, David Buss, Paul Andreassen and Roger Brown for their contributions to the research and to the preparation of this paper.     

Special majority rules and the existence of voting equilibria

This paper is concerned with voting rules in which one alternative defeats a second alternative if and only if it is preferred to the second alternative by a pre-specified proportion of the individuals who have strict preferences on the pair. In particular, the paper focuses on the potential of two alternative lower bounds (for the proportion used) as tools for studying the existence of voting equilibria (i.e., for studying the existence of alternatives which cannot be defeated). It establishes that there are certain important contexts where one of the two bounds does not directly reveal whether any voting equilibria exist, but the other one does.     

Facial expressions of emotion influence interpersonal trait inferences

Theorists have argued that facial expressions of emotion serve the interpersonal function of allowing one animal to predict another's behavior. Humans may extend these predictions into the indefinite future, as in the case of trait inference. The hypothesis that facial expressions of emotion (e.g., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) affect subjects' interpersonal trait inferences (e.g., dominance and affiliation) was tested in two experiments. Subjects rated the dispositional affiliation and dominance of target faces with either static or apparently moving expressions. They inferred high dominance and affiliation from happy expressions, high dominance and low affiliation from angry and disgusted expressions, and low dominance from fearful and sad expressions. The findings suggest that facial expressions of emotion convey not only a target's internal state, but also differentially convey interpersonal information, which could potentially seed trait inference.This article constitutes a portion of my dissertation research at Stanford University, which was supported by a National Science Foundation Fellowship and an American Psychological Association Dissertation Award. Thanks to Nancy Alvarado, Chris Dryer, Paul Ekman, Bertram Malle, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Steven Sutton, Robert Zajonc, and more anonymous reviewers than I can count on one hand for their comments.     

The possibility of efficient provision of a public good in voluntary participation games

In this study, we provide the conditions for efficient provision of a public good in a participation game in which a non-negative integer number of units of the public good can be provided. In the case in which at most one unit of the public good can be provided, we provide refinements of Nash equilibria at which agents choose only a Nash equilibrium with an efficient allocation and provide sufficient conditions for cost-sharing rules that guarantee the existence of a Nash equilibrium with an efficient allocation. In the case of a multi-unit public good, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a Nash equilibrium with an efficient allocation and prove that Nash equilibria are less likely to support efficient allocations if the participation of many agents is needed for efficient provision of the public good in the case of identical agents. I would like to thank Koichi Tadenuma, Yukihiro Nishimura, Toshiyuki Fujita, John Weymark, Tatsuyoshi Saijo, Takehiko Yamato, Toshiji Miyakawa, Motohiro Sato, Takashi Shimizu, Nobue Suzuki, and Dirk T. G. Rübbelke for helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank the anonymous referees for detailed comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the Japanese Economic Research Foundation and the Grand-in-Aid for Young Scientists (Start-up) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Any remaining errors are my own.     

Encoders vs decoders as units of analysis in research in nonverbal communications

An expanded analysis that permits generalization to populations of both encoders and decoders is described and illustrated. It is shown that treating encoders as a between-subjects factor and decoders as a within-subjects factor can yield tests of significance that differ markedly from those obtained from analyses regarding decoders as a between-subjects factor and encoders as a within-subjects factor. Although these issues were discussed as they apply to studies involving encoders and decoders of nonverbal cues, they are more generally relevant to any study in which groups of judges make observations of groups of stimulus persons.Preparation of this paper was supported in part by the National Science Foundation. We want to thank Donald B. Rubin for his helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.     

The adoption of external networking by American schools

Hypotheses from diffusion and resource dependence theory are applied to the explanation of participation in external networking (inter-networking) by schools. A national probability sample of 571 U.S. K-12 schools was used to test factors predicting schools’ use of external networks for instructional purposes. Early (vs late) adoption of computers did not predict later involvement in networking. Neither school spending nor rural region predicted network participation, except through the intervening variable of computer density. Thus, no matter how a school has acquired computers, once the base has been established it serves as an essential ingredient in taking the next step into external networking. The results were disappointing for diffusion theory and certainly point toward further investigation of this phenomenon. The findings also point to the importance of building a technological infrastructure in order to boost and leverage many of the instructional reform initiatives in education. where he has been since completing his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1970. His primary specialty has been computing: developing computer-related methods in sociology as well as doing research on the social aspects of information technology. Shon Magnan is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota and a research analyst at Questar Data Systems in Eagan Minnesota. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number SED-9154511. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.     

Undergraduate research experience as preparation for graduate school

Graduate students learn to be sociologists in part by doing research. Many undergraduate institutions whose roles have been primarily defined by teaching have inadequately addressed the need of their students to obtain research experience. When such opportunities are available, and when they are properly structured and coordinated with the undergraduate curriculum, advantages accrue to both students and the profession. This paper examines curricular and extracurricular ways to strengthen undergraduate research opportunities as preparation for graduate school. It is suggested that such preparation is also beneficial to many students who do not go on to graduate school. His primary research areas are methodology and urban sociology. He is currently working on models of urban housing markets and neighborhood change and is editing a book on those topics with Donald J. Bogue. This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (8852039).     

The Consequences of Validated and Self-Reported Voting Measures

This paper reports on the results of validation of the self-reportedregistration status and voting behavior of respondents in the1976 and 1978 American National Election Studies. The resultsindicate about one in seven of the respondents misreported theirregistration status or voting behavior. Comparative analysesare conducted using simple regression models to see if differencesin their explanatory power arise using validated and self-reporteddependent variables. The results show that there are no majorchanges in the fundamental nature of basic relationships thathave been observed since the first surveys were conducted. Analysisof the effects of overreported participation on estimates ofthe partisan division of the vote in three sets of subnationalcontests reveals a likely "bandwagan" effect. . Portions of the data utilized in this article were made availableby the Inter-university Consortium for Political and SocialResearch. The data for the 1976 and 1978 American National ElectionStudies were originally collected by the Center for PoliticalStudies of the Institute for Social Research. The Universityof Michigan, under a grant from the National Science Foundation.Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Consortiumbear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretationspresented here. The comments of an anonymous reviewer, whichresulted in a fruitful extension of the analysis, are gratefullyacknowledged.     

LESSONS FOR RESEARCHERS AND FUNDING AGENCIES FROM HURRICANE KATRINA: A RESEARCH NOTE FROM MISSISSIPPI

We surveyed National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research in Mississippi to determine the economic extent of research damage and delays due to Hurricane Katrina. While several facilities were physically damaged, we found that the largest effects were time delays and missed opportunities. While psychological factors were not part of the original economic impact study, it became clear that they played an important role. Specifically, the Principal Investigator's (PI's) attitude of “just another delay” was one cultural barrier to fully accounting for the cost of these research delays. We concluded that Principal Investigators, with the assistance of funding agencies, should be better trained to measure time and opportunity costs associated with their research, so future disaster recovery efforts can more fully address those needs.     

Preschool children's ability to identify and label emotions

The present study examined preschoolers' and adults' ability to identify and label the emotions of happiness, sadness, and anger when presented through either the face channel alone, the voice channel alone, or the face and voice channels together. Subjects were also asked to rate the intensity of the expression. The results revealed that children aged 3 to 5 years are able to accurately identify and label emotions of happy, sad, and angry regardless of channel presentation. Similar results were obtained for the adult group. While younger children (33 to 53 months of age) were equally accurate in identifying the three emotions, older children (54 to 68 months of age) and adults made more incorrect responses when identifying expressions of sadness. Intensity ratings also differed according to the age of the subject and the emotion being rated.Support for this research was from a grant by the National Science Foundation (#BNS8317229) to Nathan A. Fox. The research was also supported by a grant awarded to Nathan Fox from the National Institutes of Health (#R01MH/HD17899). The authors would like to thank Professor A. Caron for providing the original videotape, Joyce Dinsmoor for help in data collection and the staff of the Center for Young Children for their cooperation.     

Criticality in games with multiple levels of approval

In this article, criticality within a voting game is rigorously defined and examined. Criticality forms the basis of the traditional voting power measures frequently employed to analyse voting games; therefore understanding criticality is a pre-requisite to understanding any such analysis. The concept of criticality is extended to encompass games in which players are allowed to express multiple levels of approval. This seemingly innocuous extension raises some important questions, forcing us to re-evaluate exactly what it means to be critical. These issues have been largely side-stepped by the main body of research as they focus almost exclusively on ‘yes/no’ voting games, the so called single level approval voting games. The generalisation to multilevel approval voting games is much more than just a theoretical extension, as any single level approval game in which a player can abstain is in effect a multilevel approval voting game.