After the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 in U.S., the container security issue got high attention, especially by U.S. government, which deployed a lot of measures to promote or improve security systems. U.S. government not only enhances its national security system, but allies with other countries against the potential terrorist attacks in the future. For example CSI (Container Security Initiative), it encourages foreign ports outside U.S. to become CSI ports as a part of U.S. anti-terrorism network. Although promotion of the security could partly reach the goal of anti-terrorism, that will influence the efficiency of container supply chain, which is the main concern when implementing the inspection measurements. This paper proposes a quick estimation methodology for an inspection service rate by a berth allocation heuristic such that the inspection activities will not affect the original container supply chain. Theoretical and simulation results show this approach is effective.
Information fusion is a research area which focuses on how to combine information from many different sources to support decision making. Commonly used information fusion systems are often complex and used in military and crises management domains. The focus of information fusion research so far has been mainly on the technological aspects. There is still a lack of understanding relevant user aspects that affect the information fusion systems as a whole. This paper presents a framework of HCI issues which considers users as embedded in the context of information fusion systems. The framework aims at providing insights regarding factors that affect user interaction to inform the development of future information fusion systems. Design considerations are presented together with a heuristic evaluation of an information fusion prototype.
Information fusion is a research area which focuses on how to combine information from many different sources to support decision making. Commonly used information fusion systems are often complex and used in military and crises management domains. The focus of information fusion research so far has been mainly on the technological aspects. There is still a lack of understanding relevant user aspects that affect the information fusion systems as a whole. This paper presents a framework of HCI issues which considers users as embedded in the context of information fusion systems. The framework aims at providing insights regarding factors that affect user interaction to inform the development of future information fusion systems. Design considerations are presented together with a heuristic evaluation of an information fusion prototype.
Since the origination of the scientific study of voting behavior in the 1950s and 1960s, political scientists have developed several models of voting behavior. As those models were tested empirically, scholars were faced with a seeming contradiction: while voters in general are poorly-informed about politics, they nonetheless are capable of making voting decisions that are consistent with their fully informed preferences. Lodge, Stroh and Wahlke (1990) posited that none of these preexisting models could adequately explain voter behavior, because they failed to explain the mechanisms that led to voters' decisions. However, relatively few studies have been done to understand how these mechanisms work, and the areas of research that have attempted to explain these mechanisms have generally been seen as lacking methodological rigor. In more recent years, scholars have looked at the use of heuristics and affect as "cognitive shortcuts," but have generally failed to provide a compelling explanation of how and when voters can make use of them, beyond demonstrating that they appear to do so. In particular, relatively little attention has been paid to the question of which heuristics are available to particular voters. While the use of heuristics is generally considered to be an individual-level phenomenon, we should expect that various groups of voters should process information in similar ways. In particular, it is reasonable to believe that voters who are more aware of politics can draw upon more sources of information when making evaluations, while less sophisticated voters are more limited in their ability to draw inferences due to their lack of knowledge. This dissertation demonstrateshowvoters make use of political information and heuristic devices in different ways based primarily on their their level of political sophistication–their ability to comprehend and apply political information when evaluating issues or making voting decisions.
In the following three essays, I explore how organized political interests behave, interact with each other, and affect public policies. As special interest groups in the United States have proliferated both in number and size over the past several decades, policymakers have responded with a mixture of public consternation and private acceptance. American voters overwhelmingly disapprove of the activities of special interest groups, but observers have been unable to articulate convincingly the effects of these activities on legislative practices and social welfare. I fill in this gap.In my first essay, I consider the effects in Congress of competition between interest groups over public policy. I model the interactions of rival interest groups and legislators as a dual form of competition over both the substance of legislation -- that is, the legislative agenda -- and legislators' votes on legislation. This is, at it's heart, a model of congressional committee behavior. The unique prediction of this model is that interest groups may intentionally spend money to have legislation introduced that is known to have no prospect of being passed. Such interest groups are motivated by the inability to shape policy in a more favorable direction and the desire to protect a sufficiently palatable status quo. This result is attractive in light of the fact that roughly 90% of legislation fails passage. I then go on to provide empirical evidence in support of this prediction using an original, large and highly detailed dataset consisting of all pieces of legislation introduced into Congress over a twenty year period. I estimate that interest groups attempt to suppress roughly 56% of legislation that is introduced in the House of Representatives and 69% of legislation that is introduced into the Senate. Furthermore, I provide evidence that groups may suppress legislation by obfuscating the linguistic content of bills.In my second essay, I consider the effects of competition within interest groups on the direction of redistributive policies. Individuals and firms form interest groups as a means of pooling resources and overcoming free riding in order to shape favorable public policies. However, the objectives of interest groups and their constituents do not perfectly align. In particular, interest groups tend to be more farsighted than their constituents. This asymmetry of objectives generates an agency problem that may manifest itself in the persistence of inefficient public policies. That is, interest groups may be directed by their relatively shortsighted constitutents to oppose efficient policy reforms. In the long run, this agency problem is exacerbated by the responses of interest groups to free riding. I provide suggestive econometric evidence from the United States in support of this argument.In my third essay, I consider the implications of the very function of an interest groups: providing a means to aggregate the preferences of a motivated but potentially heterogeneous constituency. I begin by noting a very strong empirical regularity in lobbying activity in the United States. In nearly every industry, the distribution of lobbying expenditures follows a power law. This regularity is not predicted by standard models of interest group behavior. Instead, I provide a heuristic explanation for the empirical finding. If interest group expenditure decisions are made in response to periodic signals and are determined by a constituency that continuously updates its preferences according to a simple heuristic, then we should expect to see the distribution of lobbying expenditures follow a power law. I provide additional simulation evidence in support of this claim.
