In this work, we examined the surprising value consumers attach to getting a bargain. Past research has largely understood this phenomenon in terms of the impact discounts have on perceptions of fairness. However, the evidence for this explanation is inconclusive due to a number of viable alternatives as well as issues relating to construct and external validity. The experiments we report here ...

The value of fatal risk reductions is a vital input for road safety cost-benefit analysis. It has been traditionally estimated by means of contingent valuation in spite of growing criticism surrounding this approach. Furthermore, many believe that risk-money trade-offs are not well understood due to the difficulty in internalizing tiny risks. We have succeeded in applying the Stated Choice (SC)...

Online referral systems help firms attract new customers and expand their customer base by leveraging the social relationships of existing customers. We integrate ultimatum game theory, which focuses on fairness, with motivation theories to investigate the effects of social distance and monetary incentives on the performance of three competing designs for online referral systems: rewarding only...

Clustering is one of the most well known types of unsupervised learning. Evaluating the quality of results and determining the number of clusters in data is an important issue. Most current validity indices only cover a subset of important aspects of clusters. Moreover, these indices are relevant only for data sets containing at least two clusters. In this paper, a new bounded index for cluster...

Two basic issues for data analysis and kernel-machines design are approached in this paper: determining the number of partitions of a clustering task and the parameters of kernels. A distance metric is presented to determine the similarity between kernels and FCM proximity matrices. It is shown that this measure is maximized, as a function of kernel and FCM parameters, when there is coherence w...

One of the reasons why market economies are able to thrive is that they exploit the willingness of entrepreneurs to take risks that laborers might prefer to avoid. Markets work because they remunerate good judgement and punish mistakes. Indeed, modern contract theory is based on the assumption that principals are less risk averse than agents. We investigate if the risk preferences of entreprene...

Data clustering is one of the most important areas of research in data mining and knowledge discovery. Recent research in this area has shown that the best clustering results can be achieved using multi-objective methods. In other words, assuming more than one criterion as objective functions for clustering data can measurably increase the quality of clustering. In this study, a model with two ...

In November 2001, 5,558 readers of the German weekly Die Zeit participated in a three person ultimatum experiment involving a proposer X, a responder Y, and a dummy Z (Güth and van Damme, 1998). A proposal is a vector (x, y, z) with x + y + z = DM 1200, and x ∈ {0,200,400,600,800,1000}, and y, z ∈ {100,200,300,400,500,600}. Newspaper readers could participate via internet, mail, or fax and had ...

In order to analyze the behavior of moving objects, a measure for determining the similarity of trajectories needs to be defined. Although research has been conducted that retrieved similar trajectories of moving objects in Euclidean space, very little research has been conducted on moving objects in the space defined by road networks. In terms of real applications, most moving objects are loca...