A bayesian test for a two-way contingency table using independence priors

One method of testing for independence in a two-way table is based on the Bayes factor, the ratio of the likelihoods under the independence hypothesis H and the alternative hypothesis H. The main difficulty in this approach is the specification of prior distributions on the composite hypotheses H and H. A new Bayesian test statistic is constructed by using a prior distribution on H that is concentrated about the “independence surface” H. Approximations are proposed which simplify the computation of the test statistic. The values of the Bayes factor are compared with values of statistics proposed by Gunel and Dickey (1974), Good and Crook (1987), and Spiegelhalter and Smith (1982) for a number of two-way tables. This investigation suggests a strong relationship between the new statistic and the p-value.     

Grenzen der Geschichte?

The article follows Tony Becher’s suggestion, that scientific disciplines metaphorically spoken may be looked at as different tribes of different habits occupying different territories. The articles reviews then some possibilities to determine a border between the field of historical research and sociology by different methods, different theories, different research objects e. g. past vs. present and so on. The academic field of history is described as a field importing theories, methods and objects from other academic fields, many of them from sociology. The last decades’ processes of innovation and redefinition within the field of historical research diminished cognitive differences between history and sociology so significantly that — this is the main argument of the article — more or less only the borders produced by institutions remained. Nevertheless these kind of borders have major effects all of them responsible for maintaining different disciplinary identities.     

Institutional voids,international learning effort and internationalization of emerging market new ventures

Much of the existing scholarly works portray institutional voids (IVs) in emerging economies as impeding forces against the development of new ventures. However, little attention has been paid to how such voids generate positive outcomes in emerging market new ventures. Drawing on the institutional theory, we propose IVs as crucial enablers of new venture internationalization. In addition, we investigate both how and when IVs enhance the degree to which new ventures internationalize by examining international learning effort (ILE) as a mediator and two domestic market environmental factors (i.e., environmental dynamism and competitive intensity) as important contingencies. We test our moderated mediation model using primary data gathered from 211 new ventures from Ghana. We found that ILE mediates the relationship between IVs and new venture internationalization and that both environmental dynamism and competitive intensity moderate the indirect relationship between home-country IVs and new venture internationalization. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this study.     

Quantal Risk Assessment Database: A Database for Exploring Patterns in Quantal Dose‐Response Data in Risk Assessment and its Application to Develop Priors for Bayesian Dose‐Response Analysis

Quantitative risk assessments for physical, chemical, biological, occupational, or environmental agents rely on scientific studies to support their conclusions. These studies often include relatively few observations, and, as a result, models used to characterize the risk may include large amounts of uncertainty. The motivation, development, and assessment of new methods for risk assessment is facilitated by the availability of a set of experimental studies that span a range of dose‐response patterns that are observed in practice. We describe construction of such a historical database focusing on quantal data in chemical risk assessment, and we employ this database to develop priors in Bayesian analyses. The database is assembled from a variety of existing toxicological data sources and contains 733 separate quantal dose‐response data sets. As an illustration of the database's use, prior distributions for individual model parameters in Bayesian dose‐response analysis are constructed. Results indicate that including prior information based on curated historical data in quantitative risk assessments may help stabilize eventual point estimates, producing dose‐response functions that are more stable and precisely estimated. These in turn produce potency estimates that share the same benefit. We are confident that quantitative risk analysts will find many other applications and issues to explore using this database.     

Deriving Behavior Model Parameters from Survey Data: Self‐Protective Behavior Adoption During the 2009–2010 Influenza A(H1N1) Pandemic

In this paper, we demonstrate how public opinion surveys can be designed to collect information pertinent to computational behavior modeling, and we present the results of a public opinion and behavior survey conducted during the 2009–2010 H1N1 influenza pandemic. The results are used to parameterize the Health Belief Model of individual health‐protective decision making. Survey subjects were asked questions about their perceptions of the then‐circulating influenza and attitudes towards two personal protective behaviors: vaccination and avoidance of crowds. We empirically address two important issues in applying the Health Belief Model of behavior to computational infectious disease simulation: (1) the factors dynamically influencing the states of the Health Belief Model variables and (2) the appropriateness of the Health Belief Model in describing self‐protective behavior in the context of pandemic influenza.     

International Terrorism and the World‐System

Theories of international terrorism are reviewed. It then is noted that waves of terrorism appear in semiperipheral zones of the world‐system during pulsations of globalization when the dominant state is in decline. Finally, how these and other factors might combine to suggest a model of terrorism's role in the cyclical undulations of the world‐system is suggested .