infonet-economy

This chapter exposes exaggerations and sometimes even the objectives errors which have appeared in the 'dissociative approach' : those researchers who have wrongly predicted a dislocation of the transatlantic link after the end of the Cold War. This study mainly analyses the reasoning which led to affirm that NATO was condemned to disappeart, that the Uruguay Round…

We present a model for creating, managing, and viewing the contents of scientific hyperbooks. The model we propose is based on reusable information fragments and on terminological fragments that contain concept definitions. The definition of concepts, which plays an essential role in scientific writings, are represented in a formal language. These formal definitions can then be…

Using the same data, which could come from local databases or external sources such as the Web, virtual museum designers can build different hyperspaces. It is possible that visitors would find some of them more useful than others. Therefore, virtual museums designers should be equipped with a tool by which various hyperspaces for virtual museums can be easily designed and examined.…

During the last few years, the amount of information and services available and used in electronic form has increased almost exponentially. These types of digital information and services constitute a new general class of goods, which we call Intangible Goods. Intangible goods having distinct characteristics from their counterpart tangible ones, that require specialized approaches…

This paper seeks to explain differential participation in social movements. It does so by attempting to bridge structural-level and individual-level explanations. We test a number of hypotheses drawn from the social networks and the rationalist perspectives on individual engagement by means of survey data on members of a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement. Both…

Lorenz curves and second-order dominance criteria are known to be sensitive to data contamination in the right tail of the distribution. We propose two ways of dealing with the problem: (1) Estimate Lorenz curves using parametric models for income distributions, and (2) Combine empirical estimation with a parametric (robust) estimation of the upper tail of the distribution using the…

By starting from a natural class of robust estimators for generalized linear models based on the notion of quasi-likelihood, we define robust deviances that can be used for stepwise model selection as in the classical framework. We derive the asymptotic distribution of tests based on robust deviances, and we investigate the stability of their asymptotic level under contamination. The…

Distributional dominance criteria are commonly applied to draw welfare inferences about comparisons, but conclusions drawn from empirical implementations of dominance criteria may be inßuenced by data contamination. We examine a non-parametric approach to reÞning Lorenz-type comparisons and apply the technique to two important examples from the LIS data-base.