Contributions in Merlin

The wealth dynamics of insurance companies strongly depends on the success of their investment strategies, but also on liquidity shocks which occur during unfavorable years, when indemnities to be paid to the clients exceed collected premia. An investment strategy that does not take liquidity shocks into account, exposes insurance companies to the risk of bankruptcy. This paper analyzes the behavior of insurance companies in an evolutionary framework. We show that an insurance company that merely satisfies regulatory constraints will eventually vanish from the market. We give a more restrictive no-bankruptcy condition for the investment strategies and we characterize trading strategies that are evolutionary stable, i.e., able to drive out any mutation. We study the existence of such strategies and the conditions under which financial and insurance markets are stable.

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Based on an information systems metaphor for virtual communities this paper discusses up-todateness as one crucial factor of travel information quality. Two empirical studies are presented which show that the up-to-dateness of information in travelbooks, wikis and in forum communities does not differ systematically. Based on this empirical evidence we focus on understanding the factors influencing the up-to-dateness of the three media. We propose a framework with three determining factors: 1) the initial up-to-dateness at the time the information is first available for the user 2) the information volatility in a certain domain and 3) the length of the revision cycles. From these factors we hypothesize a) that the initial up-to-dateness is best in travelbooks and worst in forums and b) that the revision cycle is shortest in forums and longest in travelbooks. Since wikis come close the initial up-to-dateness of travelbooks and its revision cycle is almost as short as in forums, we finally argue why we believe wikis to be the most up-to-date medium in the long run.

We propose to manually annotate web pages with computer-processable controlled natural language. These annotations have well-defined formal properties and can be used as query relevant summaries to automatically answer questions expressed in controlled natural language, and as the basis for other forms of automated reasoning. Last, but not least, the annotations can also serve as human-readable summaries of the contents of the web pages. Arguably, annotations written in controlled natural language can bridge the gap between informal and formal notations and leverage true collaboration between humans and machines. This is a position paper that proposes a solution combining existing methods and techniques to achieve a highly relevant practical goal, namely how to effectively access information on the web. However, our solution introduces a "chicken and egg" problem: a critical mass of web annotations will be necessary that people perceive the value of these annotations and start annotating web pages themselves. Only the future will show whether this – basically non-technical – problem can be solved.

We present a simple model of a production network in which firms are linked by supplier–customer relationships involving extension of trade–credit. Our aim is to identify the minimal set of mechanisms which reproduce qualitatively the main stylized facts of industrial demography, such as firms’ size distribution, and, at the same time, the correlation, over time and across firms, of output, growth and bankruptcies. The behavior of aggregate variables can be traced back to the direct firm–firm interdependence. In this paper, we assume that the number of firms is constant and the network has a periodic static structure. But the framework allows further extensions to investigate which network structures are more robust against domino effects and, if the network is let to evolve in time, which structures emerge spontaneously, depending on the individual strategies for orders and delivery.

Watching TV is a major human activity. Because of its immediate benefits at negligible immediate marginal costs it is for many people tempting to view TV rather than to pursue more engaging activities. As a consequence, individuals with incomplete control over, and foresight into, their own behavior watch more TV than they consider optimal for themselves and their well-being is lower than what could be achieved. We find that heavy TV viewers, and in particular those with significant opportunity cost of time, report lower life satisfaction. Long TV hours are also linked to higher material aspirations and anxiety.

Famous cultural monuments are often regarded as unique icons, making them an attractive target for terrorists. Despite huge military and police outlays, terrorist attacks on important monuments can hardly be avoided. We argue that an effective strategy for discouraging terrorist attacks on iconic monuments is for the government to show a firm commitment to swift reconstruction. Using a simple game-theoretic model, we demonstrate how a credible claim to rebuild any cultural monuments destroyed discourages terrorist attacks by altering the terrorists’ expectations and by increasing the government’s reputation costs if they fail to rebuild.

We present Pro3Gres, a deep-syntactic, fast dependency parser that combines a handwritten competence grammar with probabilistic performance disambiguation and that has been used in the biomedical domain. We discuss its performance in the domain adaptation open submission. We achieve average results, which is partly due to difficulties in mapping to the dependency representation used for the shared task.