¿Pueden pensar las máquinas? Una evaluación del problema de la inteligencia artificial mediante el equilibrio refractivo

Revisión del problema de la filosofía de la Inteligencia Artificial a la vista del Equilibrio refractivo. La revisión del problema se lleva a cabo para mostrar como "¿pueden pensar las máquinas?" sólo se ha evaluado en los terminos humanos. El equilibrio refractivo se plantea como una herramienta para definir conceptos de tal modo que la experiencia y los preceptos se encuentren en equilibrio, para con él construir una definición de pensar que no esté limitada exclusivamente a "pensar tal y como lo hacen los humanos".

“Nadie es profeta en su tierra”: Etnografía económica de las dinámicas comerciales de los Kichwa-Otavalo en San Victorino, Bogotá

La presente monografía describe las dinámicas económicas de los Kichwas Otavalo en la zona comercial de San Victorino, Bogotá. Dichas dinámicas son examinadas a partir de la Nueva Sociología Económica (Smelser & Swedberg, 2005) y la Etnografía Económica (Dufy & Weber, 2009) para mostrar las divergentes racionalidades que surgen al interior del mercado. Esto nos lleva a debatir con la ciencia económica ortodoxa y los supuestos que manejan frente a la racionalidad, el mercado y la competencia. A lo largo del texto se sostiene la importancia de los marcos de transacción (Dufy & Weber, 2009), su trascendencia, y su factibilidad para entender las dinámicas históricas, económicas y comerciales que rodean la venta ambulante en San Victorino. Por otro lado mostramos cómo estos mismos marcos de transacción se reflejan en las dinámicas comerciales de este grupo indígena oriundo del Norte de Ecuador. Se hace un recuento de su historia y de los tipos de negocios en los que resultó la tradicional venta ambulante en la capital colombiana. Las racionalidades de estos son resumidas en dos tipos de racionalidades (tradicional y modernista) que derivan tanto en grandes logros como en grandes problemáticas al interior de la comunidad. El caso, en suma, demuestra que la racionalidad económica es mucho más compleja de lo que la teoría económica ortodoxa desea admitir. Nadie es profeta en su tierra.

On the exhaustiveness of truncation and dropping strategies in many-to-many matching markets

We consider two–sided many–to–many matching markets in which each worker may work for multiple firms and each firm may hire multiple workers. We study individual and group manipulations in centralized markets that employ (pairwise) stable mechanisms and that require participants to submit rank order lists of agents on the other side of the market. We are interested in simple preference manipulations that have been reported and studied in empirical and theoretical work: truncation strategies, which are the lists obtained by removing a tail of least preferred partners from a preference list, and the more general dropping strategies, which are the lists obtained by only removing partners from a preference list (i.e., no reshuffling). We study when truncation / dropping strategies are exhaustive for a group of agents on the same side of the market, i.e., when each match resulting from preference manipulations can be replicated or improved upon by some truncation / dropping strategies. We prove that for each stable mechanism, truncation strategies are exhaustive for each agent with quota 1 (Theorem 1). We show that this result cannot be extended neither to group manipulations (even when all quotas equal 1 – Example 1), nor to individual manipulations when the agent’s quota is larger than 1 (even when all other agents’ quotas equal 1 – Example 2). Finally, we prove that for each stable mechanism, dropping strategies are exhaustive for each group of agents on the same side of the market (Theorem 2), i.e., independently of the quotas.

Does Opaqueness Make Equity Capital Expensive for Banks?

Bank managers often claim that equity is expensive, which contradicts the Modigliani-Miller irrelevance theorem. An opaque bank must signal its solvency by paying high and stable dividends in order to keep depositors tranquil. This signalling may require costly liquidations if the return on assets has been poor, but not paying the dividend might trigger a run. A strongly capitalized bank should keep substantial amounts of risk-free yet non-productive currency because the number of shares is high, which is costly. The dividend is informative of the state of the bank; rational depositors react to it.

Does uncertainty cause inertia in decision making? An experimental study of the role of regret aversion and indecisiveness

Previous research has shown that often there is clear inertia in individual decision making---that is, a tendency for decision makers to choose a status quo option. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate two potential determinants of inertia in uncertain environments: (i) regret aversion and (ii) ambiguity-driven indecisiveness. I use a between-subjects design with varying conditions to identify the effects of these two mechanisms on choice behavior. In each condition, participants choose between two simple real gambles, one of which is the status quo option. I find that inertia is quite large and that both mechanisms are equally important.

Risk, ambiguity, and diversification

Attitudes toward risk influence the decision to diversify among uncertain options. Yet, because in most situations the options are ambiguous, attitudes toward ambiguity may also play an important role. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the effect of ambiguity on the decision to diversify. I find that diversification is more prevalent and more persistent under ambiguity than under risk. Moreover, excess diversification under ambiguity is driven by participants who stick with a status quo gamble when diversification among gambles is not feasible. This behavioral pattern cannot be accommodated by major theories of choice under ambiguity.