Determinants of tourists’ length of stay

This paper aims to identify the determinants of the length of stay (LoS) of international tourists in Norway. The paper reassesses the standard assumption related to tourists’ LoS; it refers to the travel industry’s current trends, and it postulates a more sustainable approach to analyzing tourists’ LoS at the destination level. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations. The data for this study were collected during 153 data collection days and among 5,300 travelers in Norway. The determinants of LoS were analyzed by means of an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The results indicate that tourists’ LoS is positively related to their age, interests (nature-based tourists), origin (German, Dutch tourists) and mode of travel organization (package tourists). A negative and significant effect on tourists’ LoS was found for tourists’ interests (urban-based tourists), spending, and origin (home market, long-haul tourists). No significant results were revealed for two covariates, namely, gender and repeat visitation.

Charge completeness and the massless charge lattice in F-theory models of supergravity

We prove that, for every 6D supergravity theory that has an F-theory description, the property of charge completeness for the connected component of the gauge group (meaning that all charges in the corresponding charge lattice are realized by massive or massless states in the theory) is equivalent to a standard assumption made in F-theory for how geometry encodes the global gauge theory by means of the Mordell-Weil group of the elliptic fibration. This result also holds in 4D F-theory constructions for the parts of the gauge group that come from sections and from 7-branes. We find that in many 6D F-theory models the full charge lattice of the theory is generated by massless charged states; this occurs for each gauge factor where the associated anomaly coefficient satisfies a simple positivity condition. We describe many of the cases where this massless charge sufficiency condition holds, as well as exceptions where the positivity condition fails, and analyze the related global structure of the gauge group and associated Mordell-Weil torsion in explicit F-theory models.

Existence of Walrasian equilibria with discontinuous, non-ordered, interdependent and price-dependent preferences, without free disposal, and without compact consumption sets

We extend a result on existence of Walrasian equilibria in He and Yannelis (Econ Theory 61:497–513, 2016) by replacing the compactness assumption on consumption sets made there by the standard assumption that these sets are closed and bounded from below. This provides a positive answer to a question explicitly raised in He and Yannelis (Econ Theory 61:497–513, 2016). Our new equilibrium existence theorem generalizes many results in the literature as we do not require any transitivity or completeness or continuity assumption on preferences, initial endowments need not be in the interior of the consumption sets, preferences may be interdependent and price-dependent, and no monotonicity or local non satiation is needed for any of the agents.

In an Imperfect World Policy Rules Cannot be Perfect Either

It is striking that economists in particular firmly believe in the benefits of rule-binding, even though this belief runs counter to the standard assumption of economic theory that we humans are self-interested and therefore extremely resourceful when it comes to circumventing inconvenient government regulations, e.g. taxes. In Public Choice Theory, politicians are even assumed to have nothing but self-interest as their guiding motive for action. Why then, in this world of thought, should ultra-self-interested politicians of all people adhere to simple rules such as the debt brake instead of bypass them, if – as is also assumed in this model world all that matters to them is short-term electoral success, for which government debt can be helpful.

Using Response Times to Infer Others’ Private Information: An Application to Information Cascades

The standard assumption in social learning environments is that agents learn from others through choice outcomes. We argue that in many settings, agents can also infer information from others’ response times (RT), which can increase efficiency. To investigate this, we conduct a standard information cascade experiment and find that RTs do contain information that is not revealed by choice outcomes alone. When RTs are observable, subjects extract this private information and are more likely to break from incorrect cascades. Our results suggest that in environments where RTs are publicly available, the information structure may be richer than previously thought. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

Misattributed blame? Attitudes toward globalization in the age of automation

Many, especially low-skilled workers, blame globalization for their economic woes. Robots and machines, which have led to job market polarization, rising income inequality, and labor displacement, are often viewed much more forgivingly. This paper argues that citizens have a tendency to misattribute blame for economic dislocations toward immigrants and workers abroad, while discounting the effects of technology. Using the 2016 American National Elections Studies, a nationally representative survey, I show that workers facing higher risks of automation are more likely to oppose free trade agreements and favor immigration restrictions, even controlling for standard explanations for these attitudes. Although pocket-book concerns do influence attitudes toward globalization, this study calls into question the standard assumption that individuals understand and can correctly identify the sources of their economic anxieties. Accelerated automation may have intensified attempts to resist globalization.

Epistemic Obligations of the Laity

Very often when the vast majority of experts agree on some scientific issue, laypeople nonetheless regularly consume articles, videos, lectures, etc., the principal claims of which are inconsistent with the expert consensus. Moreover, it is standardly assumed that it is entirely appropriate, and perhaps even obligatory, for laypeople to consume such anti-consensus material. I maintain that this standard assumption gets things backwards. Each of us is particularly vulnerable to false claims when we are not experts on some topic – such falsehoods have systematic negative impacts on our doxastic attitudes that we can neither prevent nor correct. So, when there is clear expert consensus on a given scientific issue, while it is permissible for experts to consume anti-consensus material, laypeople have an epistemic obligation to avoid such material. This argument has important consequences for philosophical discussions of our epistemic obligations to perform or omit belief-influencing actions. Such discussions typically abstract away from the important differences between experts and laypeople. Accordingly, we should reject this typical practice as problematic, and insist instead that laypeople and experts have fundamentally different epistemic obligations.

Bounded Reasoning and Higher-Order Uncertainty

A standard assumption in game theory is that players have an infinite depth of reasoning: they think about what others think and about what others think that othersthink, and so on, ad infinitum. However, in practice, players may have a finite depth of reasoning. For example, a player may reason about what other players think, but not about what others think he thinks. This paper proposes a class of type spaces that generalizes the type space formalism due to Harsanyi (1967) so that it can model players with an arbitrary depth of reasoning. I show that the type space formalism does not impose any restrictions on the belief hierarchies that can be modeled, thus generalizing the classic result of Mertens and Zamir (1985). However, there is no universal type space that contains all type spaces.

Cumulative readings of "every" and leaks

every surprisingly gives rise to cumulative readings (Schein 1993; Kratzer 2000). The distribution of these readings is governed by scope-related asymmetries (Champollion 2010; Haslinger & Schmitt 2018). In this work, I notice a third property of these readings: cumulative readings of every receive weaker "leaky" truth-conditions under negation, previously thought to be unattested (Bayer 2013). Exploiting this third property, I build an event semantics to deliver these "leaky readings" by default. Within this semantics, it becomes possible to account for cumulative readings of every and their properties, keeping to standard assumption about the denotation for every. I also show how the same analysis predict the scope-related asymmetries and their less studied interaction with overt movement.

The Christian Lark: Spenser’s Faerie Queene I. x.51 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29

The likening of the lark to the Christian worshipper as in Herbert’s “Easter Wings” was anticipated by both Spenser and Shakespeare in references that have been overlooked to date. These stand in a tradition most richly represented by the early fourteenth- century French allegorist Guillaume de Deguileville, in his Pèlerinage de l’Ame, in which the pilgrim soul, guided towards the gate of Heaven by his guardian angel, finds himself surrounded by larks whose cruciform shapes in flying match their singing of the name “Jhesu.” Having fallen for the second time when fighting the dragon, Spenser’s Red Cross Knight rises on the third morning to find himself victorious. In his rising he is compared with the lark at dawn. The Edenic setting (which underlines the theme of the redemption of “fallen” man by the risen Christ) is also illuminated by Deguileville’s Ame; Spenser’s two trees are reminiscent of the “green and the dry” in the French allegory, according to which Christ appears as the apple pinned to the dry tree in reparation for the apple stolen by Adam. When one examines Shakespeare’s reference to the lark in Sonnet 29 in the light of the tradition represented by Deguileville (whose work not only Spenser but also Shakespeare might have read in English translation) the question arises as to whether the beloved addressed in line 10 (“thee”) could be Christ, and the speaker a Christian worshipper moving from self reproach to Christian gratitude. Such an interpretation is challenged by the standard assumption that the sonnets reflect a narrative produced by a love triangle. But from Petrarch’s Canzoniere on, sequences of love sonnets had contained poems of religious adoration.