Model‐Based Non‐parametric Variance Estimation for Systematic Sampling

Abstract. Systematic sampling is frequently used in surveys, because of its ease of implementation and its design efficiency. An important drawback of systematic sampling, however, is that no direct estimator of the design variance is available. We describe a new estimator of the model‐based expectation of the design variance, under a non‐parametric model for the population. The non‐parametric model is sufficiently flexible that it can be expected to hold at least approximately in many situations with continuous auxiliary variables observed at the population level. We prove the model consistency of the estimator for both the anticipated variance and the design variance under a non‐parametric model with a univariate covariate. The broad applicability of the approach is demonstrated on a dataset from a forestry survey.     

Gendered Peace: Four Hungarian Women Writers Against the Two World Wars

Hungary's leading women writers from Margit Kaffka to Piroska Szenes took passionate sides when compelled to choose between the ‘maternal’ protection of life and the patriot's loyalty to ‘fatherland’. ‘If only?…?this whole wartime world was turned upside down!’ and ‘No peace on earth before the last bit of soil?…?is regained!’ were characteristic wishes made by women writers on either side of the pacifist versus patriot divide. The article seeks to answer the question what, beyond background and temperament, motivated the emblematic female figures of Hungary's interwar literature coming out in favour of peace, country, or both.     

Candidate Stability and Voting Correspondences

We extend the analysis of Dutta et al. (in Econometrica, 69:1013–1038, 2001) on strategic candidacy to multivalued environments. For each agenda and each profile of voters’ preferences over running candidates, a voting correspondence selects set of running candidates. A voting correspondence is candidate stable if no candidate ever has an incentive to withdraw her candidacy when all other potential candidates run for office. In the multivalued framework, candidates’ incentives to withdraw depend on candidates’ preferences over sets. If candidates cannot vote and they compare sets of candidates according to their expected utility conditional on some prior probability assessment, then a voting correspondence satisfies candidate stability and unanimity if and only if it is dictatorial. If the probability assessments are restricted to be uniform, candidates’ preferences over sets are consistent with leximin preferences, or candidates can vote, then possibility results are obtained.This paper is a revised version of the second chapter of my Ph.D. Dissertation submitted to the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I am indebted to my supervisor Salvador Barberà for his advice, encouragement, and patience. I thank the hospitality of the Wallis Institute of Political Economy at the University of Rochester, where the revision of this paper was conducted. I am grateful to two anonymous referees and the Associate Editor, John Weymark, for their exhaustive and insightful comments. I also thank Dolors Berga, Carmen Beviá, Walter Bossert, Jernej Čopič, Bhaskar Dutta, Matt Jackson, Jordi Massó, Diego Moreno, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Yves Sprumont for helpful conversations and suggestions. Financial support through Research Grant 1998FI00022 from Comissionat per Universitats i Recerca, Generalitat de Catalunya, Research Project PB98-870 from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, Fundación Barrié de la Maza, and Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Junta de Andalucía is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Incentive compatibility and feasibility constraints in housing markets

We analyze centralized housing markets under the existence of feasibility constraints on the number of agents and objects involved in the exchanges. We focus on an incomplete information setting where only the information about how each agent ranks her endowment is private. We show that under non-degenerate ex-ante probability distributions over preference profiles, no rule satisfies the joint requirements of individual rationality, (constrained) efficiency, and ordinally Bayesian incentive compatibility.     

Acyclic sets of linear orders via the Bruhat orders

We describe Abello’s acyclic sets of linear orders [SIAM J Discr Math 4(1):1–16, 1991] as the permutations visited by commuting equivalence classes of maximal reduced decompositions. This allows us to strengthen Abello’s structural result: we show that acyclic sets arising from this construction are distributive sublattices of the weak Bruhat order. This, in turn, shows that Abello’s acyclic sets are, in fact, the same as Chameni-Nembua’s distributive covering sublattices (S.T.D.C s). Fishburn’s alternating scheme is shown to be a special case of the Abello/Chameni-Nembua acyclic sets. Any acyclic set that arises in this way can be represented by an arrangement of pseudolines, and we use this representation to derive a simple closed form for the cardinality of the alternating scheme. The higher Bruhat orders prove to be a natural mathematical framework for this approach to the acyclic sets problem. We would like to thank the Editor, Professor Bernard Monjardet, and two anonymous referees for their comments and additional references.     

A Class of Goodness-of-fit Tests Based on Transformation

There is an increasing number of goodness-of-fit tests whose test statistics measure deviations between the empirical characteristic function and an estimated characteristic function of the distribution in the null hypothesis. With the aim of overcoming certain computational difficulties with the calculation of some of these test statistics, a transformation of the data is considered. To apply such a transformation, the data are assumed to be continuous with arbitrary dimension, but we also provide a modification for discrete random vectors. Practical considerations leading to analytic formulas for the test statistics are studied, as well as theoretical properties such as the asymptotic null distribution, validity of the corresponding bootstrap approximation, and consistency of the test against fixed alternatives. Five applications are provided in order to illustrate the theory. These applications also include numerical comparison with other existing techniques for testing goodness-of-fit.     

Total production control

The new requirements for enterprise flexibility, quality improvement, costs and throughput limes reduction cannot be achieved by using traditional approaches. While US and European industry developed the grand CIM, FMS, CAD/CAM and MRP II projects, Japan introduced just-in-time and lean production, not to demonstrate the possibilities of the new technology but to expose operational inefficiencies and waste in the manufacturing process. The main CIM effort was in the flexibility and productivity improvement, bin its implementation stressed above all the technical aspects of the factory integration and the most flexible production factor, people, remained in the background. The new technology must be implemented into the organizational framework that uses and develops the skills, knowledge and creativity of the human resources. People in the production process need a new kind of decision support in the rapidly changing business environment. A new concept, total production control (TPC), that is a reaction to the present manufacturing problems will be presented. TPC integrates many methods and tools for production system analysis and improvement, production system design and production planning and control. This concept emphasizes a preventive aspect of the problem solution in the production process and supports a production manager at the three time views: past (archive and statistical database); present (shopfloor data capture and production progress monitoring); and future (simulation and modelling tools).     

Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity's Epistemic Violence

This essay opens the question of translation so as to reflect upon the movement at the borders of modernity. In particular it focuses on the question of translation as erasure, that is, as a mechanism through which modernity expands and demarcates its proper place, its territory. This operation of translation renders invisible everything that does not fit in the “parameters of legibility” of modernity's epistemic territory. Modernity's epistemic territory designates both the realm where the discourses of modernity thrive and their very horizon of intelligibility. Translation brings to view the epistemic borders where a politics of visibility is at play between erasure and visibility, disdain and recognition. To recognize the political content of modernity's epistemic territory is to recognize that the question of global social inequality cannot be addressed simply as the consequence of an incomplete modernity. It is to acknowledge that knowledge has been part and parcel of the modern / colonial systems of oppression and destitution. The epistemic territorial practices are such that all that lies outside their realm is made invisible, is excluded from the real and is actively disdained, even unnamed. At the borders their is the movement of rejection but also the movement of incorporation; where translation appears as a process of selection, classification and appropriation that erases all that does not fit into the proper place of the already established epistemic territory. The final part of the essay looks for that which escapes from the movement of translation as incorporation and addresses the question of untranslatability. This question help us reveal elements that are outside the field of appropriation of modernity. Finally we speak of translation as struggle. Thinking in terms of epistemic translation is already to begin thinking with a vocabulary of transition, of the borders; not transition in terms of chronological change, but rather referring to a transit at the borders of modernity's epistemic territory. The epistemic hegemony of modernity rests in a politics of border keeping, a politics of epistemic translation.