This article investigates the effectiveness of lottery incentive schemes for eliciting consumer valuations in large‐scale online experiments. We implement a fully incentivized condition within a ...geographically dispersed sample of consumers in which bids for a Criollo steak elicited by a Becker‐DeGroot‐Marschak mechanism are realized with certainty and the products are priority shipped in dry‐ice coolers. The fully incentivized condition is compared to between‐subject random incentivized schemes, in which only a fraction of subjects realize their choices. We tested two treatments with a 10% probability framed as a percentage or an absolute number of subjects, one treatment with a 1% probability, and a purely hypothetical reference condition. The results reveal that between‐subject random incentivized schemes with 10% and 1% payment probabilities are effective in eliciting valuations that are statistically indistinguishable from the fully incentivized scheme. In addition to finding insignificant statistical differences between 10% and 1% and the fully incentivized scheme, all incentivized conditions mitigate hypothetical bias, resulting in lower product valuations than the purely hypothetical condition. We contribute a novel methodological framework for conducting large‐scale experiments with geographically diverse and representative subjects, increasing the external validity and producing reliable valuations while significantly reducing financial and logistic constraints.
Monetary incentives remain an integral component of economics experiments. However, the experimental economics literature is inconclusive when it comes to the effectiveness of random payment ...mechanisms, specifically in non-strategic individual decision experiments. To contribute to the literature on incentives in experiments, this study performed a meta-analysis of 94 dictator game studies and examined the effect of two frequently used random payment mechanisms on behavior. The mechanisms analyzed were the random problem selection procedure (RPSP) and between-subject random incentivized system (BRIS). The meta-analysis showed that RPSP and BRIS did not significantly alter behavior when compared to a single incentivized decision and incentivizing all subjects, respectively. The results support the effectiveness of RPSP and BRIS in nonstrategic individual decision experiments.
A substantial amount of experimental evidence suggests that the critical state envelope for ballast is nonlinear, especially at low confining pressure. To study the implications of this nonlinearity ...and the associated role of particle breakage, monotonically loaded drained triaxial tests were conducted using a large-scale cylindrical triaxial apparatus. A nonlinear critical state envelope is determined in the q–p′ and υ–lnp′ planes. Mathematical expressions for critical state stress ratio and specific volume are proposed to incorporate the evolution of particle breakage during monotonic shearing. In this paper, an elastoplastic constitutive model based on the critical state soil mechanics framework is presented to capture the salient aspects of stress–strain behaviour and degradation of ballast. Constitutive parameters were conveniently determined from large-scale laboratory tests. The model is able to predict the monotonic shear behaviour of ballast corroborating with the laboratory measurements. The proposed model is further validated using experimental results available from past independent studies.
Male circumcision is one of the oldest and most widespread rituals, it has been practiced for millennia across many parts of the world. Yet this prevalence and long history do not make circumcision ...self-evident: it has also long been a topic of reflection, discussion, and controversy and continues to be so today. As the cases in this volume show, already in Antiquity, Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians clashed over male circumcision. Then as now, concerns about identity, ritual, health, masculinity, and sexuality were a factor in these disputes. Very little is known about actual circumcision practices in the ancient world. Apart from depictions in art, the relation of which to daily practice is difficult to ascertain, we have historical access mainly through texts that reveal how the practice was discursively constructed, and that relate circumcision to wider cultural practices and ideas. This book therefore mainly discusses references to circumcision in literary sources, and the way these relate to other known cultural practices and ideas. These sources date from biblical times and Antiquity and their interpretations in medieval Jewish texts and recent scholarship.
The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZNW) is one of the oldest and most highly regarded international scholarly book series in the field of New Testament ...studies. Since 1923 it has been a forum for seminal works focusing on Early Christianity and related fields. The series is grounded in a historical-critical approach and also explores new methodological approaches that advance our understanding of the New Testament and its world.
The use of real decision-making incentives remains under debate after decades of economic experiments. In time preferences experiments involving future payments, real incentives are particularly ...problematic due to between-options differences in transaction costs, among other issues. What if hypothetical payments provide accurate data which, moreover, avoid transaction cost problems? In this paper, we test whether the use of hypothetical or one-out-of-ten-participants probabilistic—versus real—payments affects the elicitation of short-term and long-term discounting in a standard multiple price list task. We analyze data from a lab experiment in Spain and well-powered field and online experiments in Nigeria and the UK, respectively (
N
= 2,038). Our results indicate that
the preferences elicited using the three payment methods are mostly the same
: we can reject that either hypothetical or one-out-of-ten payments change any of the four preference measures considered by more than 0.18 SD with respect to real payments.
The use of multiple observations near noon with a traditional sextant to determine a fix is common among celestial navigators. A recent invention is the fixed-angle ‘Bris sextant’ that comes with ...advantages, but imposes constraints due to its invariant nature. We propose a method by which both longitude and latitude can be fixed using only two sightings with such a device, each equidistant from the meridian. By modelling the solution space for the method, we explore some of the potential utility across geography and seasonal variation. Although this method was developed for use with a Bris fixed-angle sextant, it can also be conveniently used with a more traditional marine or level-bubble sextant. Because this method is computationally cumbersome, it is most convenient when used in a computer or tablet application, or with tables.
The increase of wood decay due to the fungal pathogen Heterobasidion annosum is expected to increase the vulnerability of tree stands to wind damage due to the decrease in tree anchorage (by wood ...decay in roots) and stem strength (by wood decay in stem wood). In this work, we developed a framework to simulate the effects of wood decay by Heterobasidion annosum on the vulnerability of Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.) stands to wind damage in terms of uprooting and stem breakage. We also demonstrated the model performance by using tree- and stand-level sensitivity analyses. The increase in the amount of wood decay decreased the predicted wind speeds needed for both uprooting and stem breakage of trees and increased the predicted amount of wind damage. The probability of uprooting was higher than stem breakage for infected trees, which was opposite to the findings for the healthy trees. Because of some simplifications in the modelling due to the lack of proper experimental data (e.g., effects of wood decay on strength of roots and stem in Norway spruce), our model may overestimate the risk of wind damage caused by wood decay. Therefore, further model validation is still needed based on experimental research.
Since the publication of the 2007 manifesto ‘Pour une littérature-monde en français’, scholars have questioned whether or not the initially inflammatory concept of littérature-monde has produced a ...meaningful legacy. This article re-examines the controversies which the manifesto provoked by focusing on the intellectual career of one of its principal authors: Michel Le Bris. Scholarly criticism has largely overlooked the fact that Le Bris’s involvement in the littérature-monde project is an extension of his previous involvement with Maoism and his identity as a Breton author. The manifesto can be read as Le Bris’s response to the political and cultural crises of his time which he previously addressed through activism and cultural entrepreneurship. Though Le Bris’s own defence of the manifesto is flawed and problematic, a better understanding of the context from which it originated raises important questions when considering the role of regional and minority literatures in the global age.
Building extraction, recognition and corresponding three-dimensional modeling in image is an active research field, which is mainly applied to map feature extraction, urban population survey and so ...on. It has important significance in military and civil areas. Aiming at the shortcoming of the classical invariant feature extraction algorithm, a building recognition algorithm based on local feature and shape contour matching is proposed. Firstly, according to the fact that the whole building is susceptible to rotation and inclination, the local feature points of known buildings are extracted, and their orientation, position and angle are determined. At the same time, the similarity criterion and mapping function of arbitrary shape contour matching are formulated according to the scale change information of buildings in different states, and the building recognition under different illumination and scales is realized. The simulation results show that the method can quickly and accurately adapt to the construction in different environments. The accuracy of this method fluctuates around 97%, while the average accuracy of 20 experiments is 96.56%. The average accuracy of the SFBR method is 94.66%. Compared with the SFBR and SIFT methods, the average accuracy of the method is improved by nearly 2%.
