Stagnation as the new norm and fiscal policy are examined in a New Keynesian model with adaptive learning determining expectations. We impose inflation and consumption lower bounds, which can be relevant when agents are pessimistic. The inflation target is locally stable under learning. Pessimistic initial expectations may sink the economy into steady-state stagnation with deflation. The deflat...

The Pessimistic Induction from falsity of past theories forms a perennial argument against scientific realism. This paper considers and rebuts two recent arguments due to Lewis (2001) and Lange (2002) to the conclusion that the argument from Pessimistic Induction (in its best known form) is actually fallacious. With this I want to re-establish the dignity of the Pessimistic Induction by calling...

Two university varsity swimming teams took the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) at the start of the season. Swimmers with a pessimistic explanatory style wellt on to show more unexpected poor performances during competition titan optimistic swimmers. We then tested the purported mechanism of this effect by experimentally simulating defeat, giving each swimmer falsely negative' times. Per...

In large scale distributed systems, replication is a popular technique for improving the accessibility of information and surviving the unreliability of communication networks. Pessimistic replication and optimistic replication are two contrasting replication models. They represent the two extremes in the availability-consistency. Pessimistic replication favors consistency over availability, wh...

Transactional Memory (TM) is a high-level programming abstraction for concurrency control that provides programmers with the illusion of atomically executing blocks of code, called transactions. TMs come in two categories, optimistic and pessimistic, where in the latter transactions never abort. While this simplifies the programming model, high-performing pessimistic TMs can be complex. In this...

Most software transactional memories employ optimistic concurrency control. A pessimistic semantics, however, is not without its benefits: its programming model is often much simpler to reason about and supports the execution of irreversible operations. We present a programming model that supports both optimistic and pessimistic concurrency control semantics. Our pessimistic transactions, guara...

We formulate a general class of allocation problems called categorized domain allocation problems (CDAPs), where indivisible items from multiple categories are allocated to agents without monetary transfer and each agent gets at least one item per category. We focus on basic CDAPs, where the number of items in each category is equal to the number of agents. We characterize serial dictatorships ...

We propose a novel mode of operation for Amplify-and-Forward relays in which the spectra of the relay input and output signals partially overlap. This partial-duplex relaying mode encompasses half-duplex and full-duplex as particular cases. By viewing the partial-duplex relay as a bandwidthpreserving Linear Periodic Time-Varying system, an analysis of the spectral efficiency in the presence of ...