We analyze the contract settlement data of a poultry company who contracts the production of broiler chickens with a group of independent growers. The company originally used rank-order (ordinal) tournaments to compensate their contract growers and later switched to cardinal tournaments. Based on the observed payment mechanism we construct an empirical model of a rank-order tournament game and ...

In repeated games with di®erential information on one side, the labelling \general case" refers to games in which the action of the informed player is not known to the uninformed, who can only observe a signal which is the random outcome of his and his opponent's action. Here we consider the problem of minimizing regret (in the sense ̄rst formulated by Hannan [8]) when the information available...

The question of whether private investors can discriminate between the risk taken by banks is empirically investigated by testing the risk sensitivity of European banks’ subordinated notes and debentures (SND) spreads. A unique dataset of spreads, ratings, accounting and market measures of bank risk is used for a sample of SND issued during the 1991-2000:Q1 period. Moody’s Bank Financial Streng...

We tackle the containment problem for conjunctive queries with negation, which takes two queries q1 and q2 as input and asks if q1 is contained in q2. A general approach for solving this problem consists of considering all completions of q1 (intuitively these completions represent all canonical databases that satisfy q1) and checking if each completion yields the same answer on q2. Since the to...

In this paper, we first give the maximal and minimal values of the ranks and inertias of the quadratic matrix functions q1(X) = Q1 − XP1X and q2(X) = Q2 − XP2X subject to a consistent matrix equation AX = B, where Q1, Q2, P1 and P2 are Hermitian matrices. As applications, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the solution of AX = B to satisfy the quadratic equality XP1X ∗ = Q1 and X...

This study explores the for labor-related production impacts of temperature stress both for its own interest and to understand the scope for adaptation to climate change. Focusing on non-agricultural output, I find that hot temperature exerts a significant causal impact on local labor product, with substantially larger effects in highly exposed industries such as construction, manufacturing, an...