Room assignment-rent division: A market approach

A group of friends consider renting a house but they shall first agree on how to allocate its rooms and share the rent. We propose an auction mechanism for room assignment-rent division problems which mimics the market mechanism. Our auction mechanism is efficient, envy-free, individually-rational and it yields a non-negative price to each room whenever that is possible with envy-freeness.We would like to thank seminar participants at Barcelona, Boston College, Duke, Koç, Málaga, MIT, Michigan, NYU, conference participants at the First Brazilian Workshop of Game Theory Society (Sao Paulo 2002), SED 2002-Conference on Economic Design (New York City 2002), The Sixth International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare (Pasadena 2002), an anonymous referee for their comments and Ahmet Alkan, Selçuk Karabati, Bari Tan, nsan Tunali for insightful discussions. Sönmez gratefully acknowledges the research support of KoçBank via the KoçBank scholar program and Turkish Academy of Sciences in the framework of the Young Scientist Award Program via grant TS/TÜBA-GEBP/2002-1-19. Any errors are our own responsibility.     

Effects of multicomponent training on functional fitness in older adults

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a 9-week supervised multicomponent exercise program on functional fitness and body composition in independent older adults. Forty-two adults age 60-86 years were randomly assigned to an exercise or a control group and were evaluated before and after training. The training program consisted of 3 sessions of walking, strengthening, and flexibility exercises per week. The multicomponent training program resulted in significant (p < .005) improvements on the chair stand, arm curl, 6-min walk, and up-and-go tests. The findings of this study indicate that a 9-week training program increased upper and lower body strength, aerobic endurance, and agility/dynamic balance in older adults. The most affected components of functional fitness were lower body strength and aerobic endurance. There was no effect of the 9-week training on body composition.     

Besser entscheiden im Team — aber wie?

Investment committees of banks, pension funds or investment clubs meet regularly. The members decide together about the allocation and the timing of their own assets or their customers assets. This article will point out some pitfalls and chances that are typical in this decision making process. Especial focus is set on financial psychological aspects with regards to information processing and decision making processes. At the end of the article the author will indicate a sustainable way to improve the quality of team decisions.     

Estimation of a Change Point in a Hazard Function Based on Censored Data

The hazard function plays an important role in reliability or survival studies since it describes the instantaneous risk of failure of items at a time point, given that they have not failed before. In some real life applications, abrupt changes in the hazard function are observed due to overhauls, major operations or specific maintenance activities. In such situations it is of interest to detect the location where such a change occurs and estimate the size of the change. In this paper we consider the problem of estimating a single change point in a piecewise constant hazard function when the observed variables are subject to random censoring. We suggest an estimation procedure that is based on certain structural properties and on least squares ideas. A simulation study is carried out to compare the performance of this estimator with two estimators available in the literature: an estimator based on a functional of the Nelson-Aalen estimator and a maximum likelihood estimator. The proposed least squares estimator tums out to be less biased than the other two estimators, but has a larger variance. We illustrate the estimation method on some real data sets.     

Gedanken zur Gestaltung einer professionellen Beratungsausbildung

Considerations on the design of a professional education of counselorsSome of the recently published articles about supervision-professionalizing are reflecting only sociological or psychological conceptions in order to describe and analyze professionality. In this article the authors discuss some of the mostly neglected points of view out of pedagogic and microsociologic professionalization-research (professional self, researching attitude). The existing requests of competence for supervisors are examined in order to test their teaching ability. Furthermore the content designs and didactic strategies for future counselor’s education are considered.