The emergence and persistence of a market requires a broadly accepted framework or schema for the evaluation of product offerings. In many markets, critics play an important role in the elaboration of these schemas. However, sociologists lack a systematic method for comparing critical schemas and consequently lack a systematic method for assessing how critics play their respective roles. In thi...

1 I am grateful to D. Detterman for bringing this issue to my attention. The May 13, 2008 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences featured a cover article that purported to demonstrate increases influid intelligence following training on a task ofworkingmemory (Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, & Perrig, 2008). The authors described their own findings as a “landmark result”. Their s...

Problem A recent incident, widely reported in the news media, occurred in a magnetic resonance (MR) scan room of a hospital near New York City. According to reports, a young patient suffered a fatal blow to the head from a metal oxygen canister that flew into the MR system where the patient was lying. While the details of the incident have not yet been disclosed, the New York Times account of t...

The U.S. government routinely misstates interest costs on government debt. These misstatements occur partly because the government fails to account properly for the real capital losses government creditors experience during inflationary periods.1 In addition, the government imperfectly measures the fluctuations in returns to its creditors from changes in interest rates and the maturity composit...

We performed two experiments with statistical techniques for classifying documents by date and author, using large bodies of publicly-available texts. In one experiment, we produced a Markov chain of every United States Supreme Court opinion ever written, and evaluated its ability to classify American judicial opinions by decade of authorship. In the other, we examined the performance of two se...

Massive numbers of users of social networks share various types of information such as opinions, news, and ideas in real time. As a new form of social network, Twitter is a particularly useful information source. Studying influence can help us better understand the role of social networks. The popularity of social networks like Twitter is primarily measured by the number of followers. The numbe...

This paper examines the use of market-share thresholds (safe harbors) in evaluating whether a given vertical practice should be challenged. Such thresholds are typically found in vertical restraints guidelines (e.g., the 2000 Guidelines for the European Commission and the 1985 Guidelines for the U.S. Department of Justice). We consider a model of resale price maintenance (RPM) in which firms em...

Analyzing texts from social media often encounters many challenges, including shortness, dynamic, and huge size. Short texts do not provide enough information so that statistical models often fail to work. In this paper, we present a very simple approach (namely, bagof-biterms) that helps statistical models such as Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes (HDP) to work well with short texts. By using b...

When working with a new dataset, it is important to first explore and familiarize oneself with it, before applying any advanced machine learning algorithms. However, to the best of our knowledge, no tools exist that quickly and reliably give insight into the contents of a selection of documents with respect to what distinguishes them from other documents belonging to different categories. In th...

orsc.1090.0439v1. Kunreuther, H., J. Meszaros. 1997. Organizational choice under ambiguity: Decision making in chemical industry following. B. Z. Shapira, ed. Organization Decision Making. Cambridge University Press, New York, 61–70. Lampel, J. 2006. Rules in the shadow of the future: Prudential rule making under ambiguity in the aviation industry. Internat. Rela-tions 20(3) 343–349. Lampel...