Vassar Scholarship

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...

The paper analytically and empirically examines the issue of gender inequality in household wealth in the form of tangible assets among urban poor households Thailand. It seeks to answer the following questions: (1) is there a gendered pattern of asset...

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...

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...

This paper provides a survey and synthesis of econometric tools that have been employed to study economic growth. While these tools range across a variety of statistical methods, they are united in the common goals of first, identifying interesting contemporaneous...

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...

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...

In orthodox economics, honesty or integrity is treated as either part of the constraint function or the objective function. This is at the origin of the statement, "every man has his price." However, if integrity has a price, why do...

This paper is based on the notion that the nature of current labor market informalization requires rethinking in order to guide action and formulate social policies for eliminating poverty and reducing economic inequality and job insecurity. It explores conceptually and...

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...

Robert Barro (1974) showed government debt has no real effects when generations are linked by altruistically motivated intergenerational transfers, a result now known widely as the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem.
An important condition for debt neutrality is believed to be the...

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...

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...

Authored by Debra Meloy Elmegreen, Bruce G. Elmegreen and 53 others

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...