Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

Armstrong's Axioms and Navigation Strategies

Publication Date
2018-February-02
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The paper investigates navigability with imperfect information. It shows that the properties of navigability with perfect recall are exactly those captured by Armstrong's axioms from database theory. If the assumption of perfect recall is omitted, then Armstrong's transitivity axiom is...

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Do fringe benefits cause layoffs?

Publication Date
1990-October-01
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

It is commonly believed that firms prefer layoffs to worksharing, in part, because layoffs economize on fringe benefit costs. We find that when labor markets are characterized by optimal implicit contracts, layoffs will never occur in equilibrium, regardless of the...

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Everyone knows that someone knows: quantifiers over epistemic agents

Publication Date
2018-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Modal logic S5 is commonly viewed as an epistemic logic that captures the most basic properties of knowledge. Kripke proved a completeness theorem for the first-order modal logic S5 with respect to a possible worlds semantics. A multiagent version of...

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Homer's Odyssey: A Sampling of Editions in English 1616-2017

Publication Date
2018-January
Department or Program
Document Type
Access Level
Abstract

HOMER’S ODYSSEY A Sampling of Editions in English 1616–2017 An Exhibition. Vassar College Library, 2018. The following students of GRST 289/MEDS 289 in the Fall of 2017 served as co-curators: Sydney Amspacher, Sarah Baer, Gabriella Caballero, Daisy Catling-Allen, Jack Kenney...

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How budget deficits cause trade deficits: The simple analytics

Publication Date
1989-November-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The traditional classroom presentation of international macroeconomic issues obscures the link between budget deficits, exchange rates, and the trade deficit. The article offers a simple supply and demand framework to clarify the role of budget deficits in creating trade deficits...

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Inflation, growth, and import bottlenecks in the Turkish manufacturing sector

Publication Date
1989-November-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This paper argues that, in economies heavily dependent on imported inputs, the responsiveness of price and output to cost and demand factors are altered by foreign exchange bottlenecks if the government resorts to nonmarket allocation of import licenses. A model...

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Information Flow under Budget Constraints

Publication Date
2018-February-26
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Although first proposed in the database theory as properties of functional dependencies between attributes, Armstrong's axioms capture general principles of information flow by describing properties of dependencies between sets of pieces of information. This article generalizes Armstrong's axioms to a...

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Lighthouse principle for diffusion in social networks

Publication Date
2018-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The article investigates an influence relation between two sets of agents in a social network. It proposes a logical system that captures propositional properties of this relation valid in all threshold models of social networks with the same structure. The...

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Optimal implicit contracts and the choice between layoffs and work sharing

Publication Date
1989-October-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Implicit contract models of labor market equilibrium under work sharing and layoffs are constructed to examine several common explanations for the observed market bias in favor of layoffs. We first establish the optimality of work sharing in the absence of...

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Second-Order Know-How Strategies

Publication Date
2018-July-10
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The fact that a coalition has a strategy does not mean that the coalition knows what the strategy is. If the coalition knows the strategy, then such a strategy is called a know-how strategy of the coalition. The paper proposes...

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Strategic Coalitions with Perfect Recall

Publication Date
2018-February-02
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The paper proposes a bimodal logic that describes an interplay between distributed knowledge modality and coalition know-how modality. Unlike other similar systems, the one proposed here assumes perfect recall by all agents. Perfect recall is captured in the system by...

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The income redistribution impact of financing higher education in Pakistan

Publication Date
1989-November-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

This study examines the income redistributional consequences of the public financing of higher education in Pakistan. The results show that the tax incidence and the subsidy to higher education entail a redistribution from the middle and upper to the lower...

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Unproductive expenditure in manufacturing

Publication Date
1990-August-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

A behavioral model is developed to explain the magnitude of surplus and the division of surplus into unproductive and profit for oligopoly firms in the manufacturing sector of advanced capitalist economies. Particular attention is focused upon the determinants of interfirm...

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