A Starting Point for Navigating the World of Daily Fantasy Basketball

Fantasy sports, particularly the daily variety in which new lineups are selected each day, are a rapidly growing industry. The two largest companies in the daily fantasy business, DraftKings and Fanduel, have been valued as high as $2 billion. This research focuses on the development of a complete system for daily fantasy basketball, including both the prediction of player performance and the construction of a team. First, a Bayesian random effects model is used to predict an aggregate measure of daily NBA player performance. The predictions are then used to construct teams under the constraints of the game, typically related to a fictional salary cap and player positions. Permutation based and K-nearest neighbors approaches are compared in terms of the identification of “successful” teams—those who would be competitive more often than not based on historical data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system by comparing our predictions to those from a well-known analytics website, and by simulating daily competitions over the course of the 2015–2016 season. Our results show an expected profit of approximately $9,000 on an initial $500 investment using the K-nearest neighbors approach, a 36% increase relative to using the permutation-based approach alone. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Never Waste a Good Crisis: Towards Social Sustainable Development

The report by the Stiglitz Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress highlighted the idea that sustainability in essence is about quality of life. This paper discusses and elaborates this notion. It argues that sustainable development should be seen as a process which does not focus on economic development alone, but which also includes well-balanced ecological and social development. Social aspects of sustainability deserve attention because of their instrumental and intrinsic relevance. A society needs a sense of community and commitment. The presence of social capital is very important for the liveability of a society. It is argued that the amount of social capital may fluctuate over time. This means that in the long term, future societies may be better in a social respect (more trust, more participation, less inequality) than today’s. Ensuring social sustainability is thus not only a matter of ensuring that present social cohesion is preserved, but also ensuring that this cohesion will increase or improve. The paper ends by addressing lines of research on social sustainability. The following research themes are mentioned: (1) Quality of life, social capital and social cohesion in a longitudinal perspective. (2) ‘Sustainability of what, why and for whom?’ Sustainability as an issue of choice: trade-offs. (3) Civil society and governance aspects of sustainability. (4) Public perceptions, values and opinions with regard to sustainability issues and (5) Fairness and inequality in relation to sustainability policy, both nationally and internationally.     

Compulsory Income Management in the Northern Territory – evaluating its impact

Australia has been experimenting with constraining the ways in which welfare recipients can spend their income support payments, limiting their ability to access cash and purchase some products. The policy objectives include to reduce spending on alcohol, gambling, pornography and tobacco in favour of meeting ‘basic’ family needs, especially for children, to limit the scope for financial harassment, encourage pro‐social behaviours, and build financial capabilities. In the logic of the programs these outcomes are expected to be manifest at the individual, family and community levels. The policy has primarily impacted on Indigenous Australians as a result of its geographic targeting, although a recent report has recommended a more stringent version of the program be introduced universally to all welfare recipients other than the aged. The largest of these experiments is ‘New Income Management’ in the Northern Territory, which has had more than 35,000 participants since its introduction in 2010. This article reports on the key findings of the major independent evaluation of New Income Management commissioned by the Australian Government.     

“The Vital Force”: Visuality and the National Economy

Although it has often been conceived as a material or already‐existing kind of category, the “economy”, before it can be governed, must first be “made up” and constituted in particular ways. This paper seeks to contribute to recent genealogies of the “economy” by highlighting the role of one particular “cultural” technology–the techniques of visuality–in the making up of the national economy during the interwar and postwar periods. To develop this analysis, this paper reviews the ways in which private and public financial initiatives turned to visuality and advertising as a way to appeal more directly to and mobilize working class and everyday populations. In these appeals to “popular finance” visual techniques were used to diagram both a reworked conception of the national economy as well as the modes of citizenship key to this rationality of national economic space. This case also helps underscore the heterogeneity with which the national economy was assembled as a mode of economic governance constituted in multiple and never‐completed kinds of ways. Highlighting this heterogeneity, this paper concludes, is important especially in the context of discussions of “globalization” which are, once again, provoking questions relating to the very making of economic space, practice and identity.     

Premium differentiation in the Unemployment Insurance system and the demand for labor

We simulate the effect of the introduction of premium differentiation (experience rating) in the Dutch Unemployment Insurance system on the demand for labor for a variety of sectors in the Dutch economy. For the simulations we use the Bentolila and Bertola (1990) framework as a point of departure. In the simulations, the introduction of experience rating is modeled as expenditure neutral: in the absence of premium differentiation the cost of financing UI is modeled as a wage tax (independent of the number of workers fired by the firm), whereas in the presence of experience rating this cost is attributed to firing cost (affected by the firing action). Thus, the introduction of experience rating results in a shift from wage cost to firing cost. Following the political debate on the issue in the Netherlands, we assume that the introduction of experience rating does neither lead to a change in tax rates paid by workers nor to a change in eligibility rules or replacement rates of benefit claimants. Specific attention is paid to the distinction between young and old workers . In the model, labor adjustment costs (hiring and firing costs) are linear. The model allows for uncertainty in the business cycle.All correspondence to Hans Bloemen. Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno     

Coparenting and Relationship Quality Effects on Father Engagement: Variations by Residence,Romance

We focused on coparenting support, partner relationship quality, and father engagement in families with young children that did not change structurally over 4 years of participation in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N = 1,756). There was a significantly stronger and more robust positive association between fathers' perceived coparenting support at age 1 and father engagement at age 3 among nonresidential nonromantic parents compared with residential (married or cohabiting) and nonresidential romantic parents. There was a significantly stronger and positive association between relationship quality at age 1 and father engagement at age 3 among nonresidential nonromantic parents compared with residential parents. The findings emphasize the importance of considering both family structure and romantic involvement contexts of fathering when tracking father engagement over time.     

Learning-project structures in different work types: an empirical analysis

This study demonstrates that work-related learning projects can be organized using different structural arrangements. Sixteen learning projects conducted by ninety-six participants in three different work types were analysed and compared both qualitatively and quantitatively. No evidence was found for the claim that learning-project structures necessarily depend on the type of work in which they are carried out. However, two distinct combinations of learning project structure and work type did not emerge. It is concluded that actors have organizational choice in organizing learning projects, but their options are less likely to be realized if the learning-project type is very different from the worktype.