A decentralized model of information pricing in networks

We propose a recursive method of pricing an information good in a network of holders and demanders of this good. The prices are determined via a unique equilibrium outcome in a sequence of bilateral bargaining games that are played by connected agents. If the information is an homogenous, non-depreciating good without network effects we derive explicit formulae which elucidate the role of the link pattern among the players. Particularly, we find out that the equilibrium price is intimately related to the existence of cycles in the network: It is zero if a cycle covers the trading pair and it is proportional to the direct and indirect utility that the good generates otherwise.

Science for sale in a free market economy: But at what price? ABA and the treatment of autism in Europe.

Educating the public accurately about Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is an important undertaking, not least because misconceptions and myths about ABA abound. In this paper we argue that, unfortunately, the efforts of many dedicated professionals and parents to disseminate accurate information about the benefits of ABA for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are damaged by a few behavior analysts whose focus seems to be more on monetary gains than social responsibility. We cite examples of the resulting harm to the public image of behavior analysis from a number of European countries. We conclude by calling upon fellow scientists to unite in their opposition to unscrupulous abuses of free market forces for short-term monetary gains that damage the dissemination of the science of behavior analysis and thereby ultimately disadvantage those who should benefit primarily from our science, i.e., some of the most vulnerable citizens of society.

Trading Activity in Options and Stock Around Price-Sensitive News Announcements

This study investigates the trading activity in options and stock markets around informed events with extreme daily stock price movements. We find that informed agents are more likely to trade options prior to negative news and stocks ahead of positive news. We also show that optioned stocks overreact to the arrival of negative news, but react efficiently to positive news. However, the overreaction patterns are unique to the subsample of stocks with the lowest pre-event abnormal option/stock volume ratio (O/S). This finding suggests that the incremental benefit of option listing is related to the level of option trading activity, over and beyond the presence of an options market on the firm's stock. Finally, we find that the pre-event abnormal O/S is a better predictor of stock price patterns following a negative shock than is the pre-event O/S, implying that the former may contain more information about the future value of stocks than the latter.

Evaluation of information extraction techniques to label extracted data from e-commerce web page

Automatically determining and assigning shared and meaningful text labels to data extracted from an e-Commerce web page is a challenging problem. An e-Commerce web page can display a list of data records, each of which can contain a combination of data items (e.g. product name and price) and explicit labels, which describe some of these data items. Recent advances in extraction techniques have made it much easier to precisely extract individual data items and labels from a web page, however, there are two open problems: 1. assigning an explicit label to a data item, and 2. determining labels for the remaining data items. Furthermore, improvements in the availability and coverage of vocabularies, especially in the context of e-Commerce web sites, means that we now have access to a bank of relevant, meaningful and shared labels which can be assigned to extracted data items. However, there is a need for a technique which will take as input a set of extracted data items and assign automatically to them the most relevant and meaningful labels from a shared vocabulary. We observe that the Information Extraction (IE) community has developed a great number of techniques which solve problems similar to our own. In this work-in-progress paper we propose our intention to theoretically and experimentally evaluate different IE techniques to ascertain which is most suitable to solve this problem.