The pioneering model of electoral competition was developed by Harold Hotelling and Anthony Downs. The model developed by Hotelling and Downs and many subsequent models in the literature about electoral competition have assumed that candidates embody policies and, if a voter is not indifferent between the policies embodied by two candidates, then the voter’s choices are fully determined by his ...

The present paper studies the Hotelling-Downs and the Wittman-Roemer models of two-party competition when voter conformism is present and the policy space is uni-dimensional. We consider two types of voter conformism, bandwagon and underdog, and study their effects on political equilibrium of the two models. Even if voter conformism is present, the Hotelling-Downs parties propose an identical p...

Image quality can be defined objectively in terms of the performance of some "observer" (either a human or a mathematical model) for some task of practical interest. If the end user of the image will be a human, model observers are used to predict the task performance of the human, as measured by psychophysical studies, and hence to serve as the basis for optimization of image quality. In this ...

Barten’s model of spatio-temporal contrast sensitivity function of human visual system is embedded in a multi-slice channelized Hotelling observer. This is done by 3D filtering of the stack of images with the spatio-temporal contrast sensitivity function and feeding the result (i.e., the perceived image stack) to the multi-slice channelized Hotelling observer. The proposed procedure of consider...

Automated visual inspection, a crucial manufacturing step, has been replacing the more time-consuming and less accurate human inspection. This research explores automated visual inspection of surface defects in a light-emitting diode (LED) chip. Commonly found on chip surface are water-spot blemishes which impair the appearance and functionality of LEDs. Automated inspection of water-spot defec...

We consider a Hotelling game where a finite number of retailers choose a location, given that their potential consumers are distributed on a network. Retailers do not compete on price but only on location, therefore each consumer shops at the closest store. We show that when the number of retailers is large enough, the game admits a pure Nash equilibrium and we construct it. We then compare the...

We study the percentage of welfare losses (PWL) in models of horizontal and vertical differentiation. In the Hotelling model, we show that PWL depends on the underlying parameters in a non-monotonic way. We also show that PWL can be calculated from market data-locations and market size-except when the market is covered and exhibits maximal product differentiation. PWL can be very large-up to 37...

Multivariate control charts are used for monitoring multiple series simultaneously, for the purpose of detecting shifts in the mean vector in any direction. In the context of disease outbreak detection, interest is in detecting only an increase in the process means. Two practical approaches for deriving directional Hotelling charts are Follmann’s correction and Testik and Runger’s quadratic pro...