We review Shafer’s theory of evidence. We then introduce the concepts of entropy and specificity in the framework of Shafer’s theory. These become complementary aspects in the indication of the quality of evidence.

High quality classroom discussion is important to student development, enhancing abilities to express claims, reason about other students’ claims, and retain information for longer periods of time. Previous small-scale studies have shown that one indicator of classroom discussion quality is specificity. In this paper we tackle the problem of predicting specificity for classroom discussions. We ...

I offer a theory of joint ownership by extending the standard property right theory of the firm to situations where parties can endogenously choose the degree of specificity of their investments (i.e., both the type of investment—specific and general—and the level of each). When specific and general investments are complements, the standard GHM results are obtained and joint ownership is subopt...

One of the main problems in soccer is to coordinate in real time scale collective behavior of team members, who solve a common task by solving individual tasks. The specificity of the problem consists in the fact that soccer players with their collective and individual skills, individual behavior and incomplete knowledge of the environment and limited resources should succeed in reaching the co...

With scarce empirical support, prior literature argues that managers tend to withhold good news and promote bad news to preserve their bargaining power against labor unions. This paper provides evidence on this rarely supported argument. Using comprehensive firm-level data in Korea where labor unions have a long tradition of making credible threats, we find that overall disclosure frequency is ...

Chit-chat models are known to have several problems: they lack specificity, do not display a consistent personality and are often not very captivating. In this work we present the task of making chit-chat more engaging by conditioning on profile information. We collect data and train models to (i) condition on their given profile information; and (ii) information about the person they are talki...