Jovan Stojkovic, Correlation Processes: Application to Default Intensity Models, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Master's Thesis)
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Alain Moënnat, Capital Structure Arbitrage, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Master's Thesis)
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 Amelie Brune, Endogenous Authority: Design and Analysis of a Laboratory Experiment, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Master's Thesis)
In this paper, we document the realization and analysis of an experiment designed by Fehr et al. [2010] which studies the role of di fferent types of authorities in improving coordination within small groups.
We find that in a minimum coordination game without communication, adding an authority that recommends contributions significantly improves coordination. The existence of an authority is more important than the bindingness of recommendations. On average, democratically elected authorities do not perform as well as random authorities regardless of their degree of formal power. Formality via the endowment of a dismissal mechanism is generally used to enforce recommendations, but only democratic authorities also use it for the purpose of prevention or personal amusement, which constitutes an abuse of power. An explanation for these results is that there can be a relatively large probability of dissatisfaction from election results in small groups.
Subjects show a strong preference for authorities with a low degree of risk aversion, who as a consequence choose large initial contributions in the minimum coordination game despite maximal uncertainty. As an authority, the first recommendation made as well as trust and trustworthiness is crucial for the quality of future coordination. |
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Gabor Stefanics, Tim Fosker, Martina Huss, Natasha Mead, Denes Szucs, Usha Goswami, Auditory sensory deficits in developmental dyslexia: A longitudinal ERP study, NeuroImage, Vol. 57 (3), 2011. (Journal Article)
The core difficulty in developmental dyslexia across languages is a “phonological deficit”, a specific difficulty with the neural representation of the sound structure of words. Recent data across languages suggest that this phonological deficit arises in part from inefficient auditory processing of the rate of change of the amplitude envelope at syllable onset (inefficient sensory processing of rise time). Rise time is a complex percept that also involves changes in duration and perceived intensity. Understanding the neural mechanisms that give rise to the phonological deficit in dyslexia is important for optimising educational interventions. In a three-deviant passive ‘oddball’ paradigm and a corresponding blocked ‘deviant-alone’ control condition we recorded ERPs to tones varying in rise time, duration and intensity in children with dyslexia and typically developing children longitudinally. We report here results from test Phases 1 and 2, when participants were aged 8–10 years. We found an MMN to duration, but not to rise time nor intensity deviants, at both time points for both groups. For rise time, duration and intensity we found group effects in both the Oddball and Blocked conditions. There was a slower fronto-central P1 response in the dyslexic group compared to controls. The amplitude of the P1 fronto-centrally to tones with slower rise times and lower intensity was smaller compared to tones with sharper rise times and higher intensity in the Oddball condition, for children with dyslexia only. The latency of this ERP component for all three stimuli was shorter on the right compared to the left hemisphere, only for the dyslexic group in the Blocked condition. Furthermore, we found decreased N1c amplitude to tones with slower rise times compared to tones with sharper rise times for children with dyslexia, only in the Oddball condition. Several other effects of stimulus type, age and laterality were also observed. Our data suggest that neuronal responses underlying some aspects of auditory sensory processing may be impaired in dyslexia. |
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Florian Stahl, Daniela Schäfer, The Impact of Brand Equity on the Dynamics of Oline Brand Communities, In: Marketing Dynamics Conference 2011, Proceedings of Marketing Dynamics Conference 2011, 2011. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
The great potential offered by online social networks to attract consumer attention to brands and extend customer relationships has captured the marketer’s imagination. Consumers will join specific brand communities on online social networks and publically associate themselves with a brand, because they possess a preconceived perception of the underlying brand. We illustrate the impact of brand perception on the formation of online brand communities from a social-network perspective using individual-level network data. We show that brand perception – namely, differentiation, relevance, esteem, and knowledge – not only attracts the initial brand community, but also has an impact on the brand community’s evolution. Moreover, the network characteristics of the initial brand community are crucial for the long-term success of the brand community. |
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Ralph Lehmann, Erste Führungsrolle, In: NZZ, 30, p. 75, 24 July 2011. (Newspaper Article)
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Bruno Frey, Graubünden im Fusionsfieber: Ein Appell zur Nachdenklichkeit, In: Die Südostschweiz, p. 22, 22 July 2011. (Newspaper Article)
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Bruno Frey, Tullock challenges: happiness, revolutions, and democracy, Public Choice, Vol. 148 (3-4), 2011. (Journal Article)
Gordon Tullock is one of the most important of the founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical “Tullock Challenges.” The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and to some extent Google. Both innovations lead to strong incentives by governments to manipulate the policy outcomes. In general, “What is important will be manipulated by the government.” To restrain government manipulation, one has to turn to Constitutional Economics and increase the possibilities for direct popular participation and federalism or introduce random mechanisms. |
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Martin Killias, Bruno Frey, Daniel Thürer, Fusionsfieber - ein Appell zur Nachdenklichkeit, In: Die Süddeutsche, p. 3, 22 July 2011. (Newspaper Article)
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Marc Chesney, Derivative Finanzinstrumente und ihre Systemrisiken, In: NZZ, 167, p. 29, 20 July 2011. (Newspaper Article)
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Dorit Assaf, Rolf Pfeifer, EmbedIT - an Open Embedded Systems Kit for Education, In: 5th International Multi-Conference on Society, Cybernetics and Informatics (IMSCI11), 2011. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Students today are a generation of consumers of
technological devices and software. They tend to consider themselves as technology savvy and digital natives. However, this pervasive use of technology seems to encourage mastering the usage of a device rather than the interest to understand the technical details behind it. This might help to explain the decreasing number of enrollments in science and technology disciplines at Universities in the USA as well as in Europe. In this paper we introduce our concept of promoting interest in science and technology through understanding technological gadgets young people are familiar with. We introduce an implementation of this concept, an open embedded systems kit for education (EmbedIT) which currently is under development. Unlike common educational robot kits EmbedIT enables students to access the technical world in a non-engineering focused way. Through a graphical user interface students can play with sensors and actuators and are able to easily implement technological objects using them. We believe
that once fascination and a basic understanding of
technology has been established, the barrier to learn more
advanced topics such as programming and electronics is
lowered. Further we describe the hardware and software
of EmbedIT, the current state of implementation, and
possible applications. |
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Rolf Grütter, Iris Helming, Simon Speich, Abraham Bernstein, Rewriting queries for web searches that use local expressions, In: 5th International Symposium on Rules (RuleML 2011), Springer, Barcelona, Spain, 2011-07-19. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Users often enter a local expression to constrain a web search to ageographical place. Current search engines’ capability to deal with expressionssuch as “close to” is, however, limited. This paper presents an approach thatuses topological background knowledge to rewrite queries containing localexpressions in a format better suited to standard search engines. To formalizelocal expressions, the Region Connection Calculus (RCC) is extended byadditional relations, which are related to existing ones by means of compositionrules. The approach is applied to web searches for communities in a part ofSwitzerland which are “close to” a reference place. Results show that queryrewriting significantly improves recall of the searches. When dealing withapprox. 30,000 role assertions, the time required to rewrite queries is in therange of a few seconds. Ways of dealing with a possible decrease ofperformance when operating on a larger knowledge base are discussed. |
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Anja Feierabend, Anerkennung oft wirksamer als Geld, In: NZZ, 29, p. 81, 17 July 2011. (Newspaper Article)
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Karl Schmedders, Tackling Multiplicity of Equilibria with Gröbner Bases, In: ICE Workshop. 2011. (Conference Presentation)
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Philipp Johannes Renner, Karl Schmedders, Finding All Pure-Strategy Equilibria in Dynamic and Static Games with Continuous Strategies, In: ICE Workshop. 2011. (Conference Presentation)
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Karl Schmedders, Solving Dynamic Games with Newton's Method, and Optimal Patent Rules, In: ICE Workshop . 2011. (Conference Presentation)
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Christian Tilgner, Boris Glavic, Michael Böhlen, Carl-Christian Kanne, Smile: Enabling easy and fast development of domain-specific scheduling protocols, In: 28th British National Conference on Databases, Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg, 2011-07-12. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Modern server systems schedule large amounts of concurrent requests constrained by, e.g., correctness criteria and service-level agreements. Since standard database management systems provide only limited consistency levels, the state of the art is to develop schedulers imperatively which is time-consuming and error-prone. In this poster, we present Smile (declarative Scheduling MIddLEware), a tool for developing domain-specific scheduling protocols declaratively. Smile decreases the effort to implement and adapt such protocols because it abstracts from low level scheduling details allowing developers to focus on the protocol implementation. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach by implementing a domain-specific use case protocol. |
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Kohei Nakajima, Tao Li, Naveen Suresh Kuppuswamy, Rolf Pfeifer, Biologically Inspired Control of a Simulated Octopus Arm via Recurrent Neural Networks, In: The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2011), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
The aim of this study is to explore a control architecture that can control a soft and "exible octopus-like arm for an object reaching task. Inspired by the division of functionality between the central and peripheral nervous systems of a real octopus, we discuss that the important factor of the control is not to regulate the arm muscles one by one but rather to control them globally with appropriate timing, and we propose an architecture equipped with a recurrent neural network (RNN). By setting the task environment for the reaching behavior, and training the network with an incremental learning strategy, we evaluate whether the network is then able to achieve the reaching behavior or not. As a result, we show that the RNN can successfully achieve the reaching behavior, exploiting the physical dynamics of the arm due to the timing-based control. |
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Silvia Teuber, Uschi Backes-Gellner, P Ryan, K Wagner, Mobility and Internal Labor Markets in a Comparison of Matched-pair Engineering Companies in the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Switzerland, In: 32th International Working Party on Labour Market Segmentation. 2011. (Conference Presentation)
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Emilio Marti, Andreas Scherer, How to Analyze High Frequency Trading: Tracking Its Performance, Looking for Potential Rupture Points Or Uncovering Suppression, In: 7th International Critical Management Studies Conference. 2011. (Conference Presentation)
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