In this paper we provide sufficient conditions that ensure the convexity of the inverse images of an operator, monotone in some sense. Further, conditions that ensure the monotonicity, respectively the local injectivity of an operator are also obtained. Combining the conditions that provide the local injectivity, respectively the convexity of the inverse images of an operator, we are able to ob...

As a result of sustained housing market fragility, a growing number of borrowers are walking away from their underwater homes even though they have the ability to pay. Despite recent advances, questions remain about what influences this decision. In this paper, we use survey data to examine the role of social expectations, financial literacy and knowledge of default consequences. We find that h...

Are there systematic political economy factors that shape preferences for foreign aid, a key component of American foreign policy? We analyze votes in the House of Representatives from 1979 to 2003 that would increase or decrease foreign aid by considering the political, economic, and ideological characteristics of legislators and their districts. To understand who supports and opposes foreign ...

The relationship between a product and its design process is generally complex and not fully understood. When modifying a product, industry still rarely considers the implementation process and its consequences for other design activities in the company, which is hard to assess with conventional planning methods. Although change processes are highly constrained, product and process constraints ...

Ambiguity may lead us to insert abstractions into our experience that create a greater number of unanticipated, unintended consequences. When people move closer to the flux of ambiguity, they work to make sense of it. High reliability organizations react to ambiguity by increasing it momentarily. To increase ambiguity is to grasp more of the situation, to refrain from simplifications, and to st...

The concept of teacher agency has emerged in recent literature as an alternative means of understanding how teachers might enact practice and engage with policy (e.g. Lasky, 2005; Leander & Osbourne, 2008; Ketelaar et al., 2012; Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2013). But what is agency? Agency remains an inexact and poorly conceptualised construct in much of the literature, where it is often not ...

Under some assumptions we prove that the Deligne tensor product of categories of constructible perverse sheaves on pseudomanifolds X and Y is the category of constructible perverse sheaves on X × Y . The Deligne external tensor product functor is identified with the geometrical external tensor product.

the age of 40 is reduced compared with the peak reproductive years, a small number of women continue to be fertile even into their early 50s. Women over 40 have a higher risk than younger women of having fetal abnormalities as well as pregnancy-related complications. At least one in four pregnancies in women older than 40 ends in abortion. Anecdotally, women may underestimate their fertility an...

Online discussion forum, which plays an important role in online criticism, provides useful information such as online commentaries generated by other users. The paper uses regulatory focus theory to explain how online commentaries are processed differently depending on the user’s information processing style and how each self-regulatory mode moderates the impact of online commentaries on one’s...