One, two, (three), infinity: Newspaper and lab beauty-contest experiments

"Beauty-contest" is a game in which participants have to choose, typically, a number in [0,100], the winner being the person whose number is closest to a proportion of the average of all chosen numbers. We describe and analyze Beauty-contest experiments run in newspapers in UK, Spain, and Germany and find stable patterns of behavior across them, despite the uncontrollability of these experiments. These results are then compared with lab experiments involving undergraduates and game theorists as subjects, in what must be one of the largest empirical corroborations of interactive behavior ever tried. We claim that all observed behavior, across a wide variety of treatments and subject pools, can be interpretedas iterative reasoning. Level-1 reasoning, Level-2 reasoning and Level-3 reasoning are commonly observed in all the samples, while the equilibrium choice (Level-Maximum reasoning) is only prominently chosen by newspaper readers and theorists. The results show the empirical power of experiments run with large subject-pools, and open the door for more experimental work performed on the rich platform offered by newspapers and magazines.

Semantic data integration in a newspaper content management system

A newspaper content management system has to deal with a very heterogeneous information space as the experience in the Diari Segre newspaper has shown us. The greatest problem is to harmonise the different ways the involved users (journalist, archivists...) structure the newspaper information space, i.e. news, topics, headlines, etc. Our approach is based on ontology and differentiated universes of discourse (UoD). Users interact with the system and, from this interaction, integration rules are derived. These rules are based on Description Logic ontological relations for subsumption and equivalence. They relate the different UoD and produce a shared conceptualisation of the newspaper information domain.