This paper explores the links between matching, ranking, rating, Elo- rating, logit modeling, Rasch modeling, Item-Response Theory (IRT), voting, aggregation, and the like. These issues arise e.g. when testing students, or rating web pages or scientific papers. The analysis is at a very basic...

This paper gives the announcement that the 2nd edition of DRGTPE is available at Dutch University Press. The basic idea of the book is that Keynes's General Theory is generalised even further by including endogenous government in the model, so that we arrive at a truly general Political Economy....

The commonly adopted definitions of risk and uncertainty generate conceptual problems and inconsistencies, and they are a source of confusion in general. However, alternative and proper definitions are: (1) First there is the distinction between certainty and uncertainty. (2) Uncertainty forks...

Proper monetary accounting rules are: (1) Central Banks should conform to the practice of the US Federal Reserve to distinguish its Balance Sheet from its Statement of Conditions. (2) Fiat money should not appear as a liability in a Balance Sheet. (3) The Central Bank should not record more...

Travel time losses in the Netherlands are likely to get worse in the years ahead if capacity is not added to cope with the demand. This particularly creates problems for business travel, which is characterized by a high “value of time”. In the Netherlands, policy makers have a long-standing...

If an economic system has a regime switch, then we could assume that the preferences have remained basically the same, but that only the state of information has changed. An alternative view is that there has been a shift of preferences, as for example individual persons can change their mind...

This paper consits of two parts .. First part is a Static model..and models a globalised economy and observes the effects of sense of security between nations and the willingness of people to develop and cooperate.the Second part considers the world as a set of regions specialising in production...

W3C is about to release MathML 2.0. This should have been a joyous occasion, but it appears to be a horror. They created a horrible way to do mathematics on the internet. It is Byzantinely complex, unintuitive, unesthetic, highly undocumented, it requires complex software support, etcetera. A...

Jan Tinbergen helped creating the Dutch Central Planning Bureau after 1945, and Dutch society has benefitted enormously up to this very day in 2004. The Dutch situation has also been an example to the world. But there is a down side when the CPB adopts a wrong theory and when policy becomes...

The world has 6 billion people, and rising, and we like them all to know a little bit of economics. This means that there is a huge market for economic theory, economics textbooks and teachers. As groups of economists have the objective to get a little bit of the action, a key strategy seems to...