Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Bitcoin's Technical Foundation And Its Potential For A Decentralized And Environmentally Friendly Future, Iqtiar Md Siddique

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research examines a systematic analysis of Bitcoin, employing a Coefficient of Variation (CV) approach to gauge its degree of decentralization. Bitcoin, an innovative decentralized digital currency, has received much attention for its potential to revolutionize traditional financial systems. This study employs the Coefficient of Variation (CV) to acquire insights into the wealth distribution and concentration among Bitcoin users. This research demonstrates how decentralized the network of Bitcoin is. The methodology uses real data on Bitcoin addresses and their holdings to compute the Coefficient of Variation (CV). This approach provides valuable insights into the ongoing discourse surrounding Bitcoin's decentralization, offering …

Interval Estimates: How To Make Them More Adequate And How To Use Them In Economic Analysis And Decision Making, Laura Adriana Berrout-Ramos

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In many real-life situations, we need to make decisions in situations when we do not have full information about the consequences of different decisions. In particular, instead of the exact values of the relevant quantities, we only know lower and upper bounds on these values – i.e., we know an interval that contains the actual (unknown) value. These interval estimates often come from experts. This fact naturally leads to the following important questions: How should we make decisions under such interval uncertainty? How to gauge the quality of the resulting decisions? And if this quality is not sufficient – because …

Small Commercial And Industrial Electricity Consumption In Las Cruces, New Mexico, Andrew Taylor Yurachek

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Research examining small commercial and industrial electricity usage patterns have historically received less attention than residential electricity consumption patterns. This study examines electricity as an input to commercial and industrial production in Las Cruces, New Mexico using annual frequency data from 1978 to 2018. Those data examined include labor, per capita personal income, price measures for electricity and natural gas, and weather variables. The long-run and short-run elasticities of the data are then estimated using an autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL). In the long run, CIS customers in Las Cruces respond to natural gas a complimentary good, and the derived-demand …

So How To Make Group Decisions? Arrow's Impossibility Theorem 70 Years After, Hung T. Nguyen, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In 1951, Kenneth Arrow proved that it is not possible to have a group decision making procedure that satisfies reasonable requirements like fairness. From the theoretical viewpoint, this is a great result -- well-deserving the Nobel Prize that was awarded to Professor Arrow. However, from the practical viewpoint, the question remains -- so how should we make group decisions? A usual way to solve this problem is to provide some reasonable heuristic ideas, but the problem is that different seemingly reasonable idea often lead to different group decision -- this is known, e.g., for different voting schemes. In this paper, …

Is It Fair That Advanced Workers Get Paid Disproportionally More: Economic Analysis, Olga Kosheleva, Sean R. Aguilar

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

On the one hand, everyone agrees that economics should be fair, that workers should get equal pay for equal work. Any instance of unfairness causes a strong disagreement. On the other hand, in many companies, advanced workers -- who produce more than others -- get paid dispropotionally more for their work, and this does not seem to cause any negative feelings. In this paper, we analyze this situation from the economic viewpoint. We show that from this viewpoint, additional payments for advanced workers indeed make economic sense, benefit everyone, and thus -- in contrast to the naive literal interpretation of …

What Is Wrong With Micromanagement: Economic View, Sean R. Aguilar, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Purpose: It is well known that micromanagement -- excessive control of employees -- is detrimental to the employees' morale and thus, decreases their productivity. But what if the managers keep people happy -- will there still be negative consequences of micromanagement? This is the problem analyzed in this paper.

Design/methodology/approach: To analyze our problem, we use general -- but simplified -- mathematical models of how productivity depends on the working rate.

Findings: We show that even in the absence of psychological discomfort, micromanagement is still detrimental to productivity. Interestingly, the negative effect of micromanagement increases as the population becomes more …

Randomized Tax Deadlines Can Help Economy, Julio C. Urenda, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Purpose: While the main purpose of reporting -- e.g., reporting for taxes -- is to gauge the economic state of a company, the fact that reporting is done at pre-determined dates distorts the reporting results. For example, to create a larger impression of their productivity, companies fire temporary workers before the reporting date and re-hire then right away. The purpose of this study is to decide how to avoid such distortion.

Design/methodology/approach: We want to make our solution applicable for all possible reasonable optimality criteria. Thus, we use a general formalism for describing and analyzing all such criteria.

Findings: We …

When To Stop Computing And Start Investing, Sean R. Aguilar, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to analyze when -- while predicting the future price of a financial instrument -- we should stop computations and start using this information for the actual investment.

Design/methodology/approach: We derive the explicit formulas explaining how the resulting gain depends on the duration of computations.

Findings: We provide an algorithm that enables us to decide the computation time that leads to the largest possible gain.

Originality/value: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution to the problem. Following our recommendations will allow investors to select the computation time for which the …

Need For Diversity In Elected Decision-Making Bodies: Economics-Related Analysis, Nguyen Ngoc Thach, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

On a qualitative level, everyone understands the need to have diversity in elected decision-making bodies, so that the viewpoint of each group be properly taken into account. However, when only the usual economic criteria are used in this election -- e.g., in the election of company's board -- the resulting bodies often under-represent some groups (e.g., women). A frequent way to remedy this situation is to artificially enforce diversity instead of strictly following purely economic criteria. In this paper, we show the current seeming contradiction between economics and diversity is caused by the imperfection of the use economic models: in …

Why Quadratic Log-Log Dependence Is Ubiquitous And What Next, Sean R. Aguilar, Vladik Kreinovich, Uyen Pham

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many real-life situations ranging from financial to volcanic data, growth is described either by a power law -- which is linear in log-log scale, or by a quadratic dependence in the log-log scale. In this paper, we use natural scale invariance requirement to explain the ubiquity of such dependencies. We also explain what should be a reasonable choice of the next model, if quadratic turns out to be not too accurate: it turns out that under scale invariance, the next class of models are cubic dependencies in the log-log scale, then fourth order dependencies, etc.

Economics Of Reciprocity And Temptation, Laxman Bokati, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Ngoc Thach

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Behavioral economics has shown that in many situations, people's behavior differs from what is predicted by simple traditional utility-maximization economic models. It is therefore desirable to be able to accurately describe people's actual behavior. In some cases, the difference from the traditional models is caused by bounded rationality -- our limited ability to process information and to come up with a truly optimal solutions. In such cases, predicting people's behavior is difficult. In other cases, however, people actually optimize -- but the actual expression for utility is more complicated than in the traditional models. In such case, it is, in …

Commonsense Explanations Of Sparsity, Zipf Law, And Nash's Bargaining Solution, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Kittawit Autchariyapanitkul

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

As econometric models become more and more accurate and more and more mathematically complex, they also become less and less intuitively clear and convincing. To make these models more convincing, it is desirable to supplement the corresponding mathematics with commonsense explanations. In this paper, we provide such explanation for three economics-related concepts: sparsity (as in LASSO), Zipf's Law, and Nash's bargaining solution.

How To Explain The Anchoring Formula In Behavioral Economics, Laxman Bokati, Vladik Kreinovich, Chon Van Le

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

According to the traditional economics, the price that a person is willing to pay for an item should be uniquely determined by the value that this person will get from this item, it should not depend, e.g., on the asking price proposed by the seller. In reality, the price that a person is willing to pay does depend on the asking price; this is known as the anchoring effect. In this paper, we provide a natural justification for the empirical formula that describes this effect.

Quantum (And More General) Models Of Research Collaboration, Oscar Galindo, Miroslav Svitek, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the last decades, several papers have shown that quantum techniques can be successful in describing not only events in the micro-scale physical world -- for which they were originally invented -- but also in describing social phenomena, e.g., different economic processes. In our previous paper, we provide an explanation for this somewhat surprising successes. In this paper, we extend this explanation and show that quantum (and more general) techniques can also be used to model research collaboration.

Why Top Experts Are Paid So Much: Economics-Based Explanation, Julio C. Urenda, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

At first glance, it seems that people should be paid in proportion to their contribution, so if one person produces a little more than the other one, he/she should be paid a little more. In reality, however, top performers are paid dis-proportionally more than those whose performance is slightly worse. How can we explain this from an economic viewpoint? We show that actually there is no paradox here: a simple economic analysis shows that in many area, it makes perfect economic sense to pay much more to top performers.

Maximum Entropy Approach To Portfolio Optimization: Economic Justification Of An Intuitive Diversity Idea, Laxman Bokati, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The traditional Markowitz approach to portfolio optimization assumes that we know the means, variances, and covariances of the return rates of all the financial instruments. In some practical situations, however, we do not have enough information to determine the variances and covariances, we only know the means. To provide a reasonable portfolio allocation for such cases, researchers proposed a heuristic maximum entropy approach. In this paper, we provide an economic justification for this heuristic idea.

Use Of Symmetries In Economics: An Overview, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva, Nguyen N. Thach, Nguyen Duc Trung

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we show that many semi-heuristic econometric formulas can be derived from the natural symmetry requirements. The list of such formulas includes many famous formulas provided by Nobel-prize winners, such as Hurwicz optimism-pessimism criterion for decision making under uncertainty, McFadden's formula for probabilistic decision making, Nash's formula for bargaining solution -- as well as Cobb-Douglas formula for production, gravity model for trade, etc.

Decision Making Under Uncertainty With Applications To Geosciences And Finance, Laxman Bokati

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In many practical situations, we need to make a decision. In engineering, we need to decide on the best design of a system, and, for existing systems â?? on the best control strategy. In financial applications, we need to decide what is the best way to invest money. In geosciences, we need to decide whether we should explore a possible mineral deposit â?? or whether we should perform more experiments and measurements (and what exactly). In some cases, we can compute the exact consequences of each decision - e.g., if we are controlling a satellite. However, in many other cases, …

Preferences (Partial Pre-Orders) On Complex Numbers -- In View Of Possible Use In Quantum Econometrics, Songsak Sriboonchitta, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In economic application, it is desirable to find an optimal solution -- i.e., a solution which is preferable to any other possible solution. Traditionally, the state of an economic system has been described by real-valued quantities such as profit, unemployment level, etc. For such quantities, preferences correspond to natural order between real numbers: all things being equal, the more profit the better, and the smaller unemployment, the better. Lately, it turned out that to adequately describe economic phenomena, it is often convenient to use complex numbers. From this viewpoint, a natural question is: what are possible orders on complex numbers? …

An Ancient Bankruptcy Solution Makes Economic Sense, Anh H. Ly, Michael Zakharevich, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

While econometrics is a reasonable recent discipline, quantitative solutions to economic problem have been proposed since the ancient times. In particular, solutions have been proposed for the bankruptcy problem: how to divide the assets between the claimants? One of the challenges of analyzing ancient solutions to economics problems is that these solutions are often presented not as a general algorithm, but as a sequence of examples. When there are only a few such example, it is often difficult to convincingly extract a general algorithm from them. This was the case, for example, for the supposedly fairness-motivated Talmudic solution to the …

Quantum Ideas In Economics Beyond Quantum Econometrics, Vladik Kreinovich, Hung T. Nguyen, Songsak Sriboonchitta

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is known that computational methods developed for solving equations of quantum physics can be successfully applied to solve economic problems; there is a whole related research area called quantum econometrics. Current quantum econometrics techniques are based on a purely mathematical similarity between the corresponding equations, without any attempt to relate the underlying ideas. We believe that the fact that quantum equations can be successfully applied in economics indicates that there is a deeper relation between these areas, beyond a mathematical similarity. In this paper, we show that there is indeed a deep relation between the main ideas of …

Short-Term Forecasting Analysis Of Municipal Water Demand In El Paso, Texas, Alejandro Ceballos

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Short-term water demand forecasts inform decisions regarding budgeting, rate design, water supply system operations, and effective implementation of conservation policies. This study develops a Linear Transfer Function (LTF) forecasting model for El Paso, Texas, a growing city located in the desert Southwest region of the United States. The model is used to generate monthly-frequency out-of-sample simulations of water demand for periods when actual demand is known. To measure the accuracy of the LTF projections against viable alternatives, a set of benchmark forecasts is also developed. Both descriptive accuracy metrics and formal statistical tests are used to analyze predictive performance. The …

Residential Electricity Demand In Arkansas, Ileana M. Resendez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study analyzes residential electricity demand in Arkansas. Explanatory variables utilized include real per capita income, residential electricity price, heating degree days, cooling degree days, and residential natural gas price. The results indicate that the income effect dominates the substitution effect given a real personal income increase and a decline in real electricity rates in the state of Arkansas during the period under study.

Solar Pv Power Generation Forecasting Using Hybrid Intelligent Algorithms And Uncertainty Quantification Based On Bootstrap Confidence Intervals, Donna Alhakeem

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Thesis focuses on short-term photovoltaic forecasting (STPVF) for the power generation of a solar PV system using probabilistic forecasts and deterministic forecasts. Uncertainty estimation, in the form of a probabilistic forecast, is emphasized in this Thesis to quantify the uncertainties of the deterministic forecasts. Two hybrid intelligent models are proposed in two separate chapters to perform the STPVF. In Chapter 4, the framework of the deterministic proposed hybrid intelligent model is presented, which is a combination of wavelet transform (WT) that is a data filtering technique and a soft computing model (SCM) that is generalized regression neural network (GRNN). …

A Long- And Short-Run Analysis Of Electricity Demand In Ciudad Juarez, Ericka Cecilia Mendez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Economic growth and appliance saturation are increasing electricity consumption in Mexico. Annual frequency data from 1990 to 2012 are utilized to develop an error correction framework that sheds light on short- and long-run electricity consumption behavior in Ciudad Juarez, a large Mexican metropolitan economy at the border with the United States. The results for this study reveal that electricity is an inelastic normal good in this market. Moreover, natural gas is found to be a weak complement to electricity. With regards to the customer base in this urban economy, population, employment, and income exercise positive and statistically significant impacts on …

Should Voting Be Mandatory? Democratic Decision Making From The Economic Viewpoint, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Boakun Li

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many decisions are made by voting. At first glance, the more people participate in the voting process, the more democratic -- and hence, better -- the decision. In this spirit, to encourage everyone's participation, several countries make voting mandatory. But does mandatory voting really make decisions better for the society? In this paper, we show that from the viewpoint of decision making theory, it is better to allow undecided voters not to participate in the voting process. We also show that the voting process would be even better -- for the society as a whole -- if we allow partial …

Why Clayton And Gumbel Copulas: A Symmetry-Based Explanation, Vladik Kreinovich, Hung T. Nguyen, Songsak Sriboonchitta

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In econometrics, many distributions are non-Gaussian. To describe dependence between non-Gaussian variables, it is usually not sufficient to provide their correlation: it is desirable to also know the corresponding copula. There are many different families of copulas; which family shall we use? In many econometric applications, two families of copulas have been most efficient: the Clayton and the Gumbel copulas. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this empirical efficiency, by showing that these copulas naturally follow from reasonable symmetry assumptions. This symmetry justification also allows us to provide recommendations about which families of copulas we should use …

Microstructure And Property Evaluation Of Lifepo4 Thin Films For Application In Microbatteries, Jose Marcos Mares

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The shortage of fossil fuels and the requirements to produce clean, environmental friendly, efficient, and economical energy are the principal problems in the context of energy technology for current and future generations. Therefore, advanced energy storage and conversion capabilities with higher capacity and efficiency are desired. Currently, there is an enormous interest in the development of high energy density rechargeable batteries for use in domestic applications, automotive industries and portable electronic applications. The present research focuses on the development of LiFePO4 thin films for solid-state thin-film microbatteries. The present effort was performed with a specific purpose of understanding the effect …