I introduce a microfounded model of campaign finance with office-seeking politicians, a continuum of voters, and a large number of heterogeneous lobbies. Lobbies make contributions to politicians according to a common agency framework. Politicians use contributions to finance their electoral...

AMS classifications: 90D12, 90C05, 90C34.

This paper develops a framework which analyzes how a population's culture affects the decisions of rational profit maximizing firms, while simultaneously exploring how the actions of these firms in turn affect the population's culture.By endogenizing culture as well as the more usual economic...

This paper presents results from an experimental manipulation of one versus multiple-items per screen format in a Web survey.The purpose of the experiment was to find out if a questionnaire s format influences how respondents provide answers in online questionnaires and if this is depending on...

The objective of data mining is the extraction of knowledge from databases. In practice, one often encounters difficulties with models that are constructed purely by search, without incorporation of knowledge about the domain of application.In economic decision making such as credit loan...

This paper demonstrates that the reason for widespread default of mortgages in the subprime market was a sudden reversal in the house price appreciation of the early 2000's. Using loan-level data on subprime mortgages, we observe that the majority of subprime loans were hybrid adjustable rate...

Abstract: We propose a new way to derive tractable robust counterparts of a linear conic optimization problem by using the theory of Beck and Ben-Tal [2] on the duality between the robust (“pessimistic”) primal problem and its “optimistic” dual. First, we obtain a new convex...