Vassar Scholarship

To achieve humanitarian objectives, international development assistance must be structured to insure its effectiveness. The resulting conditionality, however, raises sovereignty concerns as attempts to promote effectiveness may conflict with respect for recipient state sovereignty and indirectly violate individuals' right to...

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...

This paper attempts to ascertain which of the convergence hypotheses – absolute, conditional, or club – best describes the economic development of the U.S. states since 1950. We use regression tree analysis to identify convergence clubs among the states and...

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 investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of USAID contract spending across congressional districts within the United States. The extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years...

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...

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...

There are numerous examples of assets with identical payout streams being priced differently. These violations of the law of one price result from two factors. First, investors have heterogeneous asset valuations so that if two groups of investors trade in...

There are numerous examples of assets with identical payout streams being priced differently. These violations of the law of one price result from two factors. First, investors have heterogeneous asset valuations so that if two groups of investors trade in...

This paper explores the effect product differentiation has on the ability of firms to collude in setting prices. It is often thought that product differentiation can be an impediment to collusion. However, the results in this paper suggest that product...

Past studies on discrimination in home mortgage lending have focused on the loan approval process, yet results show that most of the variation in minority lending across banks is due to the variation in the volume of minority applications and...

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...

Growing links between international governmental organizations and NGO/GROs in developing countries pose a moral dilemma as the promotion of effective development may conflict with respect for state sovereignty. This paper examines this dilemma and develops principles to balance the two...

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...

In this paper I present a real options model of patent litigation when patents are not perfectly enforceable. I consider both finite horizon and infinite horizon models. The theoretical results demonstrate that patent value depends not only on the underlying...

I present a model that can transform discounts on closed-end mutual funds into a measure of investor sentiment about the ability of fund managers to beat the market. This measure of sentiment varies positively with capital flows into actively managed...

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