Studying the geometry generated by Gaussian and Gaussianrelated random fields via their excursion sets is now a well developed and well understood subject. The purely non-Gaussian scenario has, however, not been studied at all. In this paper we look at three classes of stable random fields, and obtain asymptotic formulae for the mean values of various geometric characteristics of their excursio...

Random increasing k-trees represent an interesting, useful class of strongly dependent graphs for which analytic-combinatorial tools can be successfully applied. We study in this paper a notion called connectivity-profile and derive asymptotic estimates for it; some interesting consequences will also be given.

Using a gift exchange experiment, we show that the ability of reciprocity to overcome incentive problems inherent in principal-agent settings is greatly reduced when the agent’s effort is distorted by random shocks and transmitted imperfectly to the principal. Specifically, we find that gift exchange contracts without shocks encourage effort and wages well above standard predictions. However, t...

Does a Member of the British Parliament’s voting record have any effect on their constituency electoral performance? Scholars have assumed not, else they have tested the proposition with an extremely limited number of roll calls. Congruent with public opinion findings we contend that, paradoxically, voters conditionally reward both ‘party unity’ and ‘independent mindedness’ in their elected rep...

1 This is one of three background papers commissioned by the United Nations Forum for Forests. Background paper 1: Focuses on economic contributions of forests, by Agrawal, Shepherd and Cashore; Background Paper 2: Forests and crosssectorial linkages, by Lele, Karsenty, Benson, Fétiveau, Agarwal and Goswami; and Background paper 3: The role of forests in a future world, by Agrawal et al. Deline...

1 This is one of three background papers commissioned by the United Nations Forum for Forests. Background paper 1: Focuses on economic contributions of forests, by Agrawal, Shepherd and Cashore; Background Paper 2: Forests and cross-sectorial linkages, by Lele, Karsenty, Benson, Fétiveau, Agarwal and Goswami; and Background paper 3: The role of forests in a future world, by Agrawal et al. This ...

In the Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) community there is an interest around tractable models, i.e., those that can guarantee exact inference even at the price of expressiveness. Structure learning algorithms are interesting tools to automatically infer both these architectures and their parameters from data. Even if the resulting models are efficient at inference time, learning them can be...