A review of representation issues and modeling challenges with influence diagrams

Since their introduction in the mid 1970s, influence diagrams have become a de facto standard for representing Bayesian decision problems. The need to represent complex problems has led to extensions of the influence diagram methodology designed to increase the ability to represent complex problems. In this paper, we review the representation issues and modeling challenges associated with influence diagrams. In particular, we look at the representation of asymmetric decision problems including conditional distribution trees, sequential decision diagrams, and sequential valuation networks. We also examine the issue of representing the sequence of decision and chance variables, and how it is done in unconstrained influence diagrams, sequential valuation networks, and sequential influence diagrams. We also discuss the use of continuous chance and decision variables, including continuous conditionally deterministic variables. Finally, we discuss some of the modeling challenges faced in representing decision problems in practice and some software that is currently available.     

How first-generation students learn to navigate education systems: a case study of First Graduate

Students from underrepresented groups who seek to become the first in their family to attend college confront economically and racially stratified education systems. This article reports findings from an evaluation of First Graduate, an organization that offers college advising, mentoring, tutoring, and case management to first-generation students starting in seventh grade. We highlight three systems that youth say they encountered on their pathway to college: open enrollment, course taking, and college admissions. We describe how youth navigated these systems and the roles that adults played in support. Our conclusion discusses implications for how after-school programs can support first-generation students.     

Medical tourism in the Caribbean

Although travel for medical reasons has a long history, it has more recently evolved from a cottage industry to a worldwide enterprise. A number of countries are positioning themselves to attract visitors who are willing to travel to obtain health services that are more accessible, less expensive, or more available than in their countries of origin. This has in turn given rise to medical packages that combine tourism with health. Several Caribbean nations - including Cuba, Barbados, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico - hope to expand their revenues in this new market. Each country has selected specific service niches and promotes its services accordingly. While Cuba has been promoting its services to other countries for several decades, medical tourism is just beginning in the other islands. Ultimately, these nations' economic success will hinge on their comparative advantage vis-à-vis other options, while their success in terms of improving their own health care depends on the extent to which the services for tourists are also available to the islands' populations.     

Differences in Life Expectancy Between Self-Employed Workers and Paid Employees when Retirement Pensioners: Evidence from Spanish Social Security Records

European Journal of Population - The aim of this paper is to examine differences in life expectancy (LE) between self-employed (SE) and paid employee (PE) workers when they become retirement...     

UNCERTAINTY,PERSISTENCE, AND HETEROGENEITY: A PANEL DATA PERSPECTIVE

The purpose of this paper is to review newly developed identification and estimation tools that are relevant for the analysis of dynamic dependence structures of income risk. I present an application to nonlinear permanent–transitory models of household income using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), but the empirical approach is more generally applicable. Household income processes are of interest because the size of shocks, the nature of their persistence, and cross‐household heterogeneity are all important to understand how income inequality varies with age and cohort and how it translates into consumption inequality. I argue that going from an econometrics of autocovariances to an econometrics of flexible distributions is feasible and has the potential to reveal richer aspects of risk—for example, nonlinear persistence of unusual shocks.     

Realizing the Need for Rework: From Task Interdependence to Social Networks

Design rework is a core phenomenon in new product development (NPD). Yet carrying out design rework presupposes recognizing the need for it. I characterize the types of interpersonal knowledge transfer that help developers realize the need for design rework in NPD. As predicted by the NPD literature, I find that individuals who interact frequently with colleagues to address their task interdependences are more likely to realize the need for rework. I also learn that interacting with colleagues who have different expertise in process‐related knowledge (as opposed to product‐related knowledge) facilitates realizing the need for rework. However, to develop a deeper understanding of how individuals recognize the need for rework when interacting with others, we must expand our views beyond task interdependence and expertise‐related factors. In particular, organizational variables—both formal and informal—play a significant role. With respect to formal hierarchical structures, actors of superior rank are less likely to realize the need for rework regardless of whether or not their interacting partner is of superior rank; however, actors of superior rank are more likely to trigger realizing the need for rework when interacting with partners of subordinate rank. By examining an organization's informal structure, I discover that the social “embeddedness” of developers (i.e., the energy and attention invested in a dyadic relationship) significantly influences their propensity to realize the need for rework. Several hypotheses are tested in a sociometric study conducted within the development department of a software company, and I discuss the implications for behavioral operations in NPD.     

Bitter strawberries: the construction of differences in a multicultural school: a case study

This paper presents the results of a case study looking at the views of teachers and other educational professionals pertaining to the academic progress and general integration of immigrant schoolchildren in multicultural schools in the province of Huelva (Andalusia, Spain). It is organised into three sections: first, the geographical and social context of the study is described, focusing in particular on the impact on schools of migratory trends within the province associated with strawberry cultivation. This is followed by a presentation of the results of a field study into the educational panorama of immigrant pupils from various countries, drawing on verbal reports by teachers and school administrators. Finally, some conclusions are suggested for possible categories of analysis with a view to opening new lines of research in the future.     

Influence Assessment in an Heteroscedastic Errors-in-Variables Model

The main goal of this article is to consider influence assessment in models with error-prone observations and variances of the measurement errors changing across observations. The techniques enable to identify potential influential elements and also to quantify the effects of perturbations in these elements on some results of interest. The approach is illustrated with data from the WHO MONICA Project on cardiovascular disease.     

Problematizing the “informal sector”: 50 years of critique,clarification, qualification,and more critique

Since its coining in 1971, the concept of the “informal sector” has been used to draw scholarly, political, and philanthropic attention to hundreds of millions of workers who lack basic labor protections. But as the term proliferated, so too did its detractors. Critics claim that the label of “informal” homogenizes the world's poor and distorts understandings of the sources of and solutions to their economic woes. What are the origins of the concept's contradictory nature? What strategies have scholars used to increase the likelihood that it will be used to illuminate and uplift, rather than to distort and denigrate? This article analyzes how scholars have resignified and retheorized the informal economy in response to five conceptual challenges: stigmatization, definitional fuzziness, homogenization, an either/or fallacy, and the presumption of “formalization” as the solution. Such efforts have preserved the concept's analytic potency and political relevance. In the longer term, however, a true testament to the concept's value would be if it outlives its own utility; that is, if it mobilizes enough recognition and resources to the invisibilized majority of the world's workers that scholars and state bureaucrats no longer feel the need to lump them together under a misleading catchall label.     

Die Rezeption (Thyssen-)preisgekr?nter Artikel in der ?Scientific Community“

We investigate whether journal articles winning a prestigious award of the Thyssen foundation have a higher impact in the scientific literature than a control group of non-awarded articles. In average, awarded articles harvest significantly more citations than articles in the control group. Most remarkably, the average citation rank exactly matches the rank order of awards. The top award earns most citations while the second award, the third award and the non-awarded articles exhibit citation counts in declining order. The correlation of award rank and impact does not vanish if we restrict citation counts to the year of publication and the year thereafter. In this time span the distinction of excellence is very unlikely having a genuine effect on the impact measure. Thus, we do not find support for the social constructivist hypothesis that the correlation of the jury decision and the article impact is explainable by a label of distinctiveness. On the contrary, the empirical data confirm that the jury is successful in the selection of articles which in average have a larger impact in the scientific community than non-awarded publications.