• Canada
• Research dataclose
• Research softwareclose
• Other research productsclose
• 2013-2022close
• DE close
• CN close

I consider the model of a differentiated duopoly with process R&D when goods are either substitute, complements or independent. I propose a non-cooperative two-stage game with two firms producing differentiated goods. In the first stage, firms decide their technologies and in the second stage, they compete in quantities or prices. I evaluate the social welfare within a framework of Cournot and Bertrand competition models with or without investment in research and development. I prove that the Cournot price can be lower than Bertrand price when the R&D technology is relatively inefficient; thus, Cournot market structure can generate larger consumer's surplus and welfare.

We investigate the power of voting among diverse, randomized software agents. With teams of computer Go agents in mind, we develop a novel theoretical model of two-stage noisy voting that builds on recent work in machine learning. This model allows us to reason about a collection of agents with different biases (determined by the first-stage noise models), which, furthermore, apply randomized algorithms to evaluate alternatives and produce votes (captured by the second-stage noise models). We analytically demonstrate that a uniform team, consisting of multiple instances of any single agent, must make a significant number of mistakes, whereas a diverse team converges to perfection as the number of agents grows. Our experiments, which pit teams of computer Go agents against strong agents, provide evidence for the effectiveness of voting when agents are diverse.

We study the Shapley wage function, a wage scheme in which a worker's pay depends both on the number of hours worked and on the output of the firm. We then provide a way to measure the distance of an arbitrary wage scheme to this function in limited datasets. In particular, for a fixed technology and a given supply of labor, this distance is additively decomposable into violations of the classical axioms of efficiency, equal treatment of identical workers, and marginality. The findings have testable implications for the different ways in which popular wage schemes violate basic properties of distributive justice in market organizations. Applications to the linear contract and to other well-known compensation schemes are shown.

Notaris saat ini diperbolehkan melakukan sertifikasi dokumen elektronik. Kewenangan ini termaktub dalam Pasal 15 ayat (3) Undang-Undang Nomor 2 Tahun 2014 Tentang Jabatan Notaris. Selain mengesahkan akta, notaris juga dapat menyimpan berkas dalam bentuk file. Namun, tidak sedikit notaris yang masih enggan menggunakan teknologi untuk membuat dan mengesahkan sebuah akta dikarenakan adanya pertentangan antar pasal baik dalam Undang-Undang Jabatan Notaris sendiri maupun dengan pasal dalam Undang-Undang lainnya. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui apakah akta yang menggunakan teknologi informatika memiliki kekuatan pembuktian layaknya akta autentik dan apakah sertifikasi elektronik yang dilakukan oleh notaris sejalan dengan tugas dan jabatan notaris. Metode penelitian yang digunakan yaitu jenis penelitian hukum normatif yang dilakukan dengan cara penelaahan bahan pustaka atau data sekunder dengan menggunakan pendekatan undang-undang dan pendekatan konseptual. Penelitian ini berfokus pada akta hasil Rapat Umum Pemegang Saham Luar Biasa PT. Lippo Karawaci. Tbk yang dilakukan melalui video konferensi pada tanggal 13 Oktober 2021. Adanya ketidaksepakatan dari beberapa pemegang saham atas sertifikasi yang dilakukan secara elektronik karena dinilai dapat membuat akta tersebut menjadi akta di bawah tangan. Selain adanya pertentangan antara pasal, hal ini juga disebabkan tidak adanya peraturan pelaksana terkait pembuatan akta melalui teknologi informasi (Cyber Notary) oleh notaris sehingga perlunya pengkajian ulang terhadap Undang-Undang terkait dan pembuatan peraturan pelaksana khusus cyber notary.

Households have choices when it comes to reducing waste sent to landfills: reduction of consumption or packaging, reuse of goods purchased, or recycling. In this paper, we adopt a holistic approach to the analysis of these choices as separate but related facets of households' waste management behaviour. Theoretically, households produce waste as a by-product of their consumption and must then deal with it either by curbside disposal or by recycling. To the extent that managing additional waste is costly even if only in terms of time, households may also engage in waste prevention, that is, produce less waste by reducing their consumption level and/or changing their consumption patterns in favour of less waste-intensive products. As curbside disposal, waste prevention and recycling relate to the same problem and are linked via several constraints, we employ a three-equation mixed process estimation strategy which allows for the error terms of the three equations to be correlated. For the study, we rely on an original data set that permits defining waste prevention comprehensively from a list of 19 waste prevention activities, that provides for a more balanced policy representation (in terms of presence versus absence of unit pricing), and that covers a wide range of attitudinal elements, values, and norms. Given the richness of the data set, we also examine individuals' decisions over recyclable items that carry a refundable deposit in terms of both purchasing and returning habits, with particular attention to the interaction between a refundable deposit system and unit pricing.

A graph drawing is greedy if, for every ordered pair of vertices (x,y), there is a path from x to y such that the Euclidean distance to y decreases monotonically at every vertex of the path. Greedy drawings support a simple geometric routing scheme, in which any node that has to send a packet to a destination "greedily" forwards the packet to any neighbor that is closer to the destination than itself, according to the Euclidean distance in the drawing. In a greedy drawing such a neighbor always exists and hence this routing scheme is guaranteed to succeed. In 2004 Papadimitriou and Ratajczak stated two conjectures related to greedy drawings. The greedy embedding conjecture states that every 3-connected planar graph admits a greedy drawing. The convex greedy embedding conjecture asserts that every 3-connected planar graph admits a planar greedy drawing in which the faces are delimited by convex polygons. In 2008 the greedy embedding conjecture was settled in the positive by Leighton and Moitra. In this paper we prove that every 3-connected planar graph admits a planar greedy drawing. Apart from being a strengthening of Leighton and Moitra's result, this theorem constitutes a natural intermediate step towards a proof of the convex greedy embedding conjecture.

The mid-Pliocene is a valuable time interval for investigating equilibrium climate at current atmospheric CO2 concentrations because atmospheric CO2 concentrations are thought to have been comparable to the current day and yet the climate and distribution of ecosystems were quite different. One intriguing, but not fully understood, feature of the early to mid-Pliocene climate is the amplified Arctic temperature response and its impact on Arctic ecosystems. Only the most recent models appear to correctly estimate the degree of warming in the Pliocene Arctic and validation of the currently proposed feedbacks is limited by scarce terrestrial records of climate and environment. Here we reconstruct the summer temperature and fire regime from a subfossil fen-peat deposit on west–central Ellesmere Island, Canada, that has been chronologically constrained using cosmogenic nuclide burial dating to 3.9+1.5/-0.5 Ma. The estimate for average mean summer temperature is 15.4±0.8 ∘C using specific bacterial membrane lipids, i.e., branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers. This is above the proposed threshold that predicts a substantial increase in wildfire in the modern high latitudes. Macro-charcoal was present in all samples from this Pliocene section with notably higher charcoal concentration in the upper part of the sequence. This change in charcoal was synchronous with a change in vegetation that included an increase in abundance of fire-promoting Pinus and Picea. Paleo-vegetation reconstructions are consistent with warm summer temperatures, relatively low summer precipitation and an incidence of fire comparable to fire-adapted boreal forests of North America and central Siberia. To our knowledge, this site provides the northernmost evidence of fire during the Pliocene. It suggests that ecosystem productivity was greater than in the present day, providing fuel for wildfires, and that the climate was conducive to the ignition of fire during this period. The results reveal that interactions between paleo-vegetation and paleoclimate were mediated by fire in the High Arctic during the Pliocene, even though CO2 concentrations were similar to modern values.