scholarly journals Empirical Methods for Dynamic Power Law Distributions in the Social Sciences

Author(s):  
Ricardo T. Fernholz

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAKOB V. H. HOLTERMANN ◽  
MIKAEL RASK MADSEN

AbstractInternational law remains in many ways a challenge to legal science. As in domestic law, the available options appear to be exhausted by either internal doctrinal approaches, or external approaches applying more general empirical methods from the social sciences. This article claims that, while these major positions obviously provide interesting insights, none of them manage to make international law intelligible in a broader sense. Instead, it argues for a European New Legal Realist approach to international law accommodating the so-called external and internal dimensions of law in a single more complex analysis which takes legal validity seriously but as a genuinely empirical object of study. This article constructs this position by identifying a distinctively European realist path which takes as its primary inspirations Weberian sociology of law and Alf Ross’ Scandinavian Legal Realism and combines them with insights originating from Bourdieusian sociology of law.



Author(s):  
Ilga Prudnikova

The purpose of the research is to identify commonalities and possible differences in the assessment of educators’ and parents’ attitudes towards digital technologies, reasons for their usage, and identify motivation to improve their digital skills. The study is built on research activities and there are used both theoretical and empirical methods. Quantitative methods in the form of questionnaires are used during the study. The researcher is more important to identify precedents and learn about the character of educators’ and parents’ attitudes. Dinamic environment for teaching should be supported by positive attitude to tehnologies. The statistical programme used for the analyses and presentation of data in this research is the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). In conclusion: the results from this study will be used to support interesting directions for future research in the context of higt –quility education. 



2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 275-293
Author(s):  
Aristides V. Doumas ◽  
Vassilis G. Papanicolaou

The origin of power-law behavior (also known variously as Zipf’s law) has been a topic of debate in the scientific community for more than a century. Power laws appear widely in physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science, demography and the social sciences. In a highly cited article, Mark Newman [Contemp. Phys. 46 (2005) 323–351] reviewed some of the empirical evidence for the existence of power-law forms, however underscored that even though many distributions do not follow a power law, quite often many of the quantities that scientists measure are close to a Zipf law, and hence are of importance. In this paper we engage a variant of Zipf’s law with a general urn problem. A collector wishes to collect m complete sets of N distinct coupons. The draws from the population are considered to be independent and identically distributed with replacement, and the probability that a type-j coupon is drawn is denoted by pj, j = 1, 2, …, N. Let Tm(N) the number of trials needed for this problem. We present the asymptotics for the expectation (five terms plus an error), the second rising moment (six terms plus an error), and the variance of Tm(N) (leading term) as N →∞, when pj = aj / ∑j=2N+1aj, where aj = (ln j)−p, p > 0. Moreover, we prove that Tm(N) (appropriately normalized) converges in distribution to a Gumbel random variable. These “log-Zipf” classes of coupon probabilities are not covered by the existing literature and the present paper comes to fill this gap. In the spirit of a recent paper of ours [ESAIM: PS 20 (2016) 367–399] we enlarge the classes for which the Dixie cup problem is solved w.r.t. its moments, variance, distribution.





Author(s):  
Lee Cronk ◽  
Beth L. Leech

This chapter explores the concept of emergence in relation to cooperation, and more specifically how social interactions can lead to the spontaneous emergence of norms, conventions, and other social institutions that help coordinate social behavior. People can coordinate their social behaviors if they have common knowledge both about how to do so and about the fact that everyone else also knows how to do so. Such common knowledge is often enshrined in norms about social behavior, for example, which side of the road to drive on. The chapter first provides a brief historical background on the importance of emergence in the social sciences before discussing instances in which emergent phenomena help people cooperate. It also considers how mathematics helps shape cooperation and the ways that power law curves, criticality, and assurance games contribute to the study of cooperation.



2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Geoff Goldman ◽  
C.W. Callaghan

Abstract Much literature exists on the topic of ‘organisation’. Many different academic disciplinary areas stake their claim to aspects of business organisation. The social sciences offer many different perspectives of the phenomena associated with it; as different lenses, through which the object is perceived very differently. According to social constructivists, the business organisation is socially constructed. For psychologists, it exists at the nexus of individual human needs. For economists, the business organisation operates as a mechanism responding to signals of supply and demand. In this paper the business organisation is re-imaged as an entity existing within, and comprised of, chaotic systems. On the basis of a synthesis of seminal theory this paper attempts to offer a holistic perspective of business organisations; that ‘pulls together’ these multidisciplinary perspectives. On the basis of this synthesis, it is argued that the organisational context is inherently endogenous, and that qualitative research methods might offer management scientists a more valid perspective of the relationships within organisations than empirical methods can.



Methodology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Petzold ◽  
Tobias Wolbring

Abstract. Factorial survey experiments are increasingly used in the social sciences to investigate behavioral intentions. The measurement of self-reported behavioral intentions with factorial survey experiments frequently assumes that the determinants of intended behavior affect actual behavior in a similar way. We critically investigate this fundamental assumption using the misdirected email technique. Student participants of a survey were randomly assigned to a field experiment or a survey experiment. The email informs the recipient about the reception of a scholarship with varying stakes (full-time vs. book) and recipient’s names (German vs. Arabic). In the survey experiment, respondents saw an image of the same email. This validation design ensured a high level of correspondence between units, settings, and treatments across both studies. Results reveal that while the frequencies of self-reported intentions and actual behavior deviate, treatments show similar relative effects. Hence, although further research on this topic is needed, this study suggests that determinants of behavior might be inferred from behavioral intentions measured with survey experiments.



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