Negotiation between two agents is modelled as a one-time encounter between two extended logic programs. Each offers an answer set. Their mutual deal can be regarded as a trade on their answer sets. An agent can achieve this by weakening its program to surrender some literals that conflict with the offer of the other agent. We examine how ways of weakening affects the answer sets, and how they m...

The problem of valuation of life insurance payments with policyholder behaviour is studied. First a simple survival model is considered, and it is shown how cash flows without policyholder behaviour can be modified to include surrender and free policy behaviour by calculation of simple integrals. In the second part, a more general disability model with recovery is studied. Here, cash flows are ...

The problem of the valuation of life insurance payments with policyholder behavior is studied. First, a simple survival model is considered, and it is shown how cash flows without policyholder behavior can be modified to include surrender and free policy behavior by calculation of simple integrals. In the second part, a more general disability model with recovery is studied. Here, cash flows ar...

In marriage, men obtain and women surrender parental rights because: (i) by default, an unmarried woman giving birth is the child’s only known parent and sole custodian; (ii) a married mother shares custody with her husband and the presumed father; (iii) custody allocation in marriage is fixed; (iv) private contracts on rights over children amount to trade in children and have limited legal val...

We consider the fair valuation of a participating life insurance policy with surrender options when the market values of the asset are modelled by Markov-modulated Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM). We reduce the dimension of the optimal stopping problem for the policy by changing probability measures. We also provide a decomposition result for the value of the policy. The Barone-Adesi-Whaley app...

Technological advancements such as artificial intelligence have encroached upon humanity’s ability to think creatively. We rely on technical gadgets to add simple calculations and to retain listing and directories leading to memory loss. At times, we often cannot recall simple details and phone numbers since these things are all stored on our small hand-held computers. We must begin to consider...

A long-standing contradiction has posed a critical puzzle to urban sociologists: On the one hand, a wealth of ethnographic studies make the point that the kinds of neighborhoods people inhabit profoundly shape their fortunes; on the other hand, statistical analyses of “neighborhood effects” have often failed to confirm that claim. From the earliest studies of the Chicago School, through classic...

Lipoblastoma is an uncommon benign lipomatous tumor, occurring typically in children less than 3 years of age. The magnetic resonance image (MRI) is a useful tool for diagnosis of lipoblastoma; its imaging typically shows high-intensity signals on both T1-weighted (T1-W) and T2 weighted (T2-W) images. Here, we present a 12-year-old female patient with a painless mass on the anterior right shoul...