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Based on recent neuroscience evidence, we model the brain as a dual-system organization subject to three conflicts: asymmetric information, temporal horizon, and incentive salience. Under the first and second conflicts, we show that the uninformed system imposes a positive link between consumption and labor at every period. Furthermore, decreasing impatience endogenously emerges as a consequence of these two conflicts. Under the first and third conflicts, it becomes optimal to set a consumption cap. Finally, we discuss the behavioral implications of these rules for choice bracketing and expense tracking, and for consumption over the life cycle. (JEL D11, D74, D82, D87, D91)

Author affiliations provide key information when attributing academic performance like publication counts. So far, such measures have been aggregated either manually or only to top-level institutions, such as universities. Supervised affiliation resolution requires a large number of annotated alignments between affiliation strings and known institutions, which are not readily available. We introduce the task of unsupervised hierarchical affiliation resolution, which assigns affiliations to institutions on all hierarchy levels (e.g. departments), discovering the institutions as well as their hierarchical ordering on the fly. From the corresponding requirements, we derive a simple conceptual framework based on the subset partial order that can be extended to account for the discrepancies evident in realistic affiliations from the Web of Science. We implement initial baselines and provide datasets and evaluation metrics for experimentation. Results show that mapping affiliations to known institutions and discovering lower-level institutions works well with simple baselines, whereas unsupervised top-level- and hierarchical resolution is more challenging. Our work provides structured guidance for further in-depth studies and improved methodology by identifying and discussing a number of observed difficulties and important challenges that future work needs to address.

AbstractTo provide the first systematic test of whether young children will spontaneously perceive and imitate hierarchical structure in complex actions, a task was devised in which a set of 16 elements can be modelled through either of two different, hierarchically organized strategies. Three‐year‐old children showed a strong and significant tendency to copy whichever of the two hierarchical approaches they witnessed an adult perform. Responses to an element absent in demonstrations, but present at test, showed that children did not merely copy the chain of events they had witnessed, but acquired hierarchically structured rules to which the new element was assimilated. Consistent with this finding, children did not copy specific sequences of actions at lower hierarchical levels.

This research examined the influence of role (leader or follower) within a group on the use of the equality rule (dividing resources equally) in allocation decisions. Different positions in the organizational hierarchy may activate different role schemas on how individuals should behave. Role schemas for leaders communicate that they should act responsibly, but also that they deserve certain privileges relevant to the allocation situation. It was predicted that leaders would allocate more resources to themselves than to their followers. The results of three studies (two scenario studies and one experimental study) revealed that leaders violated the equality rule by allocating more than a fair share of resources to themselves. Results also showed that leaders used the equality rule more for identifiable decisions (high accountability) than for unidentifiable decisions (low accountability). Findings are discussed in terms of leadership and social decision theories. Practical implications are outlined.

Community detection in networks is an important tool in understanding complex systems. Finding these communities in complex real-world systems is important in many disciplines, such as computer science, sociology, biology, and others. In this research, we develop an algorithm for performing hierarchical fuzzy spectral clustering. The clustering algorithm is applied to small benchmark problems, as well as a large real-world campaign finance network. Afterwards, we extend the hierarchical fuzzy spectral clustering for use in evolving networks. The discovered communities are tracked through the evolving network and their underlying properties analyzed. Third, we apply association rule mining on community-based partitions of the data. A comparison of the results within and between communities show the effectiveness of this method for adding interpretability to the underlying system. Fourth, we examine the ability of hierarchical fuzzy spectral clustering on a graph to predict behavior that is not present in the graph itself. The results are shown to be effective in predicting votes in the United States legislature based on the campaign finance networks. Finally, we develop an orthogonal spectral autoencoder that is used to perform graph embedding. This approximation model avoids the eigenvector decomposition of the full network, as well as allows out-of-sample spectral clustering. The results show the embedding performs comparably to the full spectral clustering.

The growing acceptance of "governance" as an organizing concept for public management reform reflects a widespread, though not universal, belief that the focus of administrative practice is shifting from hierarchical government toward greater reliance on horizontal, hybridized, & associational forms of governance. Recent arguments to this effect, however, make limited recourse to the body of empirical evidence that might shed light on the actual extent of this transformation. In this article we report on our review of over eight hundred individual research studies in order to assess what we know about governance based on available empirical evidence across a range of disciplines & substantive fields. We find that hierarchical investigations of the nature & consequences of governmental action predominate in the literature. We supplement this primary finding with additional analyses of research on performance & on public management. We then discuss possible reasons for the observed hierarchical orientation of research. While we cannot rule out the possibility that our findings reflect researchers' biases rather than actual governance, we infer that the shifts away from hierarchical government toward horizontal governing reflect instead a gradual addition of new administrative forms that facilitate governance within a system of constitutional authority that is necessarily hierarchical. In conclusion, we propose additional research that might confirm or refute this inference & that could fill the gaps of our understanding of public governance. 6 Tables, 2 Appendixes, 53 References. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract This paper explores the Prayuth regime, which began with a military coup in May 2014. Politically, we indicate how the junta has embedded its power in ways different from the past. It does not pursue a power-sharing governance as in the Prem and Surayud governments, but tries to militarise the cabinet, parliament, and even state-owned enterprises. The new constitution is designed to institutionalise the power of the military and the traditional elite vis-à-vis the electoral forces. Ironically, however, the junta's rule by military decree and discretionary power have weakened the bureaucratic polity, rather than strengthening it. Economically, the Prayuth regime forms a partnership with a group of Sino-Thai conglomerates to establish the Pracharath scheme, with an aim to differentiate its grass-roots development policy from Thaksin's populism (Prachaniyom). Nonetheless, it has become a platform through which the giant firms perform the leading role of 'Big Brother' in supervising small businesses in their sectors. Pracharath therefore reflects the collective endeavours of the conglomerates to replace competitive markets with hierarchy, rather than encouraging local firms to catch-up with them.