Children's Social Constructions of Popularity

Children's social constructions of popularity were assessed with perceived popularity nominations (i.e., ‘Who are the most [least] popular students?’) in a sample of 487 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade elementary school students. Correlational and group‐difference analyses demonstrated that perceived popularity is moderately and positively related to sociometric popularity and social dominance. Perceived popular girls were viewed as prosocial, bright, and in possession of the expressive equipment of popularity (i.e., attractiveness and spending power); perceived popular girls who were not well‐liked (i.e., sociometrically popular) had these characteristics as well but also were above‐average (>.5 SD) on social aggression and social visibility (i.e., cool and athletic). Perceived popular boys were reported to be socially visible (i.e., cool and athletic) and with low levels of social withdrawal; perceived popular boys who were not well‐liked had these characteristics but also were reported to be socially aggressive, attractive, and to possess spending power. Finally, group comparisons revealed that perceived popularity, either alone or in combination with sociometric popularity, is accompanied by more social prerogatives (i.e., admiration, leadership, social control) than sociometric popularity alone. It was argued that being perceived as popular is a key determinant of social power in peer groups of older elementary school students.     

浅议师生互动策略

强调教师在课堂上的主导作用和学生的主体地位 ,分析了学生上课热情不高的原因 ,指出了解决的途径在于采用“启发式”的教学法 ,加强与学生的交流 ,鼓励学生积极参与到课堂活动中来 ;同时 ,论述了课堂教学中对教师的要求与教师间的合作 ,避免教学法单一 ,使学生感受不同教学法之美 ,时常保持新奇和兴奋 ,培养学习兴趣 ,提高学习效率。     

Divide-the-Dollar Game Revisited

In the Divide-the-Dollar (DD) game, two players simultaneously make demands to divide a dollar. Each player receives his demand if the sum of the demands does not exceed one, a payoff of zero otherwise. Note that, in the latter case, both parties are punished severely. A major setback of DD is that each division of the dollar is a Nash equilibrium outcome. Observe that, when the sum of the two demands x and y exceeds one, it is as if Player 1's demand x (or his offer (1−x) to Player 2) suggests that Player 2 agrees to λ_x < 1 times his demand y so that Player 1's demand and Player 2's modified demand add up to exactly one; similarly, Player 2's demand y (or his offer (1−y) to Player 1) suggests that Player 1 agrees to λ_yx so that λ_yx+y = 1. Considering this fact, we change DD's payoff assignment rule when the sum of the demands exceeds one; here in this case, each player's payoff becomes his demand times his λ; i.e., each player has to make the sacrifice that he asks his opponent to make. We show that this modified version of DD has an iterated strict dominant strategy equilibrium in which each player makes the egalitarian demand 1/2. We also provide a natural N-person generalization of this procedure. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Many Faces of a Neutral Face: Head Tilt and Perception of Dominance and Emotion

Based on the premise that human head tilt is homologous to animal dominance displays, we hypothesized that when a head is bowed, the face should be perceived as submissive, sad, displaying inferiority emotions (i.e., shame, embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, and respect) and, paradoxically, as contracting the zygomatic major muscle. Conversely, a raised head should be perceived as more dominant and displaying greater superiority emotions (i.e., contempt and pride). We conducted two experiments showing 3-D models of faces to 64 participants. The results confirmed our hypotheses and also showed that a raised head connotes happiness. In addition, we found a significant influence of the actors' sex on participants' perception, such as a bias towards perceiving stronger upward contraction of the mouth in female than male actors when the head is tilted. We discuss these findings within the context of evolution and social behavior.     

NONPARAMETRIC STATISTICS IN MULTICRITERIA ANALYSIS

The paper deals with a method of hierarchization of alternatives in a multicriteria environment by means of statistical nonparametric procedures. For each criterion, alternatives are disposed on an ordinal scale. After that a procedure similar to ANOVA is activated on the data. The differences relating to the average ranks of each action are used to build the hierarchical algorithm. The concept of outranking, in a probabilistic meaning, is reached in this way. Thereafter, we arrive at the concept of dominance using pairwise comparisons. A case study is presented which implements the methodological suggestion.     

An Entropy Measure of Flow Dominance for Predicting Operations Performance

The flow of jobs within a system is an important operating characteristic that influences system performance. While the majority of previous studies on manufacturing performance consider product flows only as an implicit parameter of the design, we introduce an explicit measure of flow dominance based on entropy and test its efficacy in predicting the performance of manufacturing systems. In computing entropy flow dominance (EFD), we aggregate information embedded in the routings of all products within a system into a single measure. EFD is designed to indicate on a 0–1 scale the level of flow dominance, where 1 represents a pure flow shop and 0 represents a pure job shop. The result is a simple measure that provides managers a way to explain and predict complex phenomena. Our experimental results indicate that EFD is a statistically significant determinant of manufacturing system performance. Furthermore, the model including EFD as an independent variable accurately predicts manufacturing system performance as measured by job flow time, flow time standard deviation, and work in process. We note that the same results can also apply to service systems, such as the “back‐room” low‐contact type systems, that have similar characteristics as manufacturing systems.     

Diversification-consistent data envelopment analysis based on directional-distance measures

We propose new diversification-consistent DEA models suitable for assessing efficiency of investment opportunities available on financial markets. The formulations based on directional distance measures enable to use several risk measures as inputs and return measures as outputs, which can take both positive and negative values. We show that various models with different strength can be obtained and strongly, semi-strongly or weakly Pareto–Koopmans efficient investment opportunities can be identified. Moreover, the optimal solutions correspond to efficient investment opportunities and can be used by investors to revise the inefficient ones. If we consider discretely distributed returns, we can prove that under proper choice of the inputs (CVaRs) and outputs (expected return), the strongest model is able to identify efficient investment opportunities with respect to the second-order stochastic dominance. Moreover, the model can be formulated as a linear programming problem. In the numerical study, the proposed DEA models are applied to 48 representative industry portfolios from US stock markets.     

一种简便易用的基尼系数计算方法

近年来,我国经济生活中,在国民经济整体快速发展的同时,社会收入分配差距明显拉大,引起了社会各界人士的广泛关注,基尼系数也随之成为当前我国经济生活中最流行的经济学语词之一。但是,对于如何计算基尼系数国内现有经济学文献很少论及,为此提出了一种简便易用的基尼系数计算方法。     

Inequality in the relative differential sense with continuous distributions

Existing literature has studied the relative differential inequality (RDI) concept as an inequality comparison for discrete distributions, where RDI dominance occurs if there is Lorenz dominance between the distributions for all subsets of individuals of corresponding rank. The paper investigates RDI in the context of continuous distributions, providing continuous counterparts to existing discrete results, and others, including discussion of the uniform, Pareto and log-normal families of continuous distributions. The usefulness of RDI for comparative static analysis in theoretical economic models based on continuous distributions is indicated.      

The comparative statics of differential rents in two-sided matching markets

This paper studies how shifts in the distribution of quality on one side of the market affect earnings on the other side in a model of one-to-one matching. A more dispersed distribution of quality hurts the low ability agents on the other side because they are matched to inferior partners. Earnings being a differential rent in these markets, this pulls down the earnings of high quality agents as well. It is shown that a more dispersed ability distribution reduces total earnings on the opposite side of the market. Under some conditions, all agents on that side are hurt.