A population of voters must elect representatives among themselves to decide on a sequence possibly unforeseen binary issues. Voters care only about the final decision, not elected representatives. The disutility voter is proportional fraction issues, where his preferences disagree with decision. While an issue-by-issue vote by all would maximize social welfare, we are interested in how well ca...

Ranking authors is vital for identifying a researcher’s impact and his standing within a scientific field. There are many different ranking methods (e.g., citations, publications, h-index, PageRank, and weighted PageRank), but most of them are topic-independent. This paper proposes topic-dependent ranks based on the combination of a topic model and a weighted PageRank algorithm. The Author-Conf...

We propose a conversational agent that can act as a virtual representative of a web site interacting with visitors using natural languages. The agent consists of three main components: dialogue act categorization, structured pattern matching, and knowledge construction and representation. Dialogue acts are identified by automata which accept sequences of keywords defined for each of the dialogu...

In this paper, we study a firm’s optimal lobbying behavior and its effect on investment in pollution abatement capital. We develop a dynamic framework where a representative firm can invest in both abatement and lobby capital in response to a possible future increase in pollution tax. We show that when the firm lobbys against the scale of the tax increase at a determined date, it should act lik...