Northwestern University

About: Northwestern University is a education organization based out in Evanston, Illinois, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 75430 authors who have published 188857 publications receiving 9463252 citations. The organization is also known as: Northwestern & NU.

A Smooth Model of Decision Making under Ambiguity

Abstract: We propose and axiomatize a model of preferences over acts such that the decision maker evaluates acts according to the expectation (over a set of probability measures) of an increasing transformation of an act's expected utility. This expectation is calculated using a subjective probability over the set of probability measures that the decision maker thinks are relevant given her subjective information. A key feature of our model is that it achieves a separation between ambiguity, identified as a characteristic of the decision maker's subjective information, and ambiguity attitude, a characteristic of the decision maker's tastes. We show that attitudes towards risk are characterized by the shape of the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function, as usual, while attitudes towards ambiguity are characterized by the shape of the increasing transformation applied to expected utilities. We show that the negative exponential form of this transformation is the special case of constant ambiguity aversion. Ambiguity itself is defined behaviorally and is shown to be characterized by properties of the subjective set of measures. This characterization of ambiguity is formally related to the definitions of subjective ambiguity advanced by Epstein-Zhang (2001) and Ghirardato-Marinacci (2002). One advantage of this model is that the well-developed machinery for dealing with risk attitudes can be applied as well to ambiguity attitudes. The model is also distinct from many in the literature on ambiguity in that it allows smooth, rather than kinked, indifference curves. This leads to different behavior and improved tractability, while still sharing the main features (e.g., Ellsberg's Paradox, etc.). The Maxmin EU model (e.g., Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989)) with a given set of measures may be seen as an extreme case of our model with infinite ambiguity aversion. Two illustrative applications to portfolio choice are offered.

Materials Design and Discovery with High-Throughput Density Functional Theory: The Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD)

Abstract: High-throughput density functional theory (HT DFT) is fast becoming a powerful tool for accelerating materials design and discovery by the amassing tens and even hundreds of thousands of DFT calculations in large databases. Complex materials problems can be approached much more efficiently and broadly through the sheer quantity of structures and chemistries available in such databases. Our HT DFT database, the Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD), contains over 200,000 DFT calculated crystal structures and will be freely available for public use at http://oqmd.org . In this review, we describe the OQMD and its use in five materials problems, spanning a wide range of applications and materials types: (I) Li-air battery combination catalyst/electrodes, (II) Li-ion battery anodes, (III) Li-ion battery cathode coatings reactive with HF, (IV) Mg-alloy long-period stacking ordered (LPSO) strengthening precipitates, and (V) training a machine learning model to predict new stable ternary compounds.

Behavior of Current Divergences under SU 3 × SU 3

Abstract: We investigate the behavior under SU3×SU3 of the hadron energy density and the closely related question of how the divergences of the axial-vector currents and the strangeness-changing vector currents transform under SU3×SU3. We assume that two terms in the energy density break SU3×SU3 symmetry; under SU3 one transforms as a singlet, the other as the member of an octet. The simplest possible behavior of these terms under chiral transformations is proposed: They are assigned to a single (3,3*)+(3*,3) representation of SU3×SU3 and parity together with the current divergences. The commutators of charges and current divergences are derived in terms of a single constant c that describes the strength of the SU3-breaking term relative to the chiral symmetry-breaking term. The constant c is found not to be small, as suggested earlier, but instead close to the value (-sqrt[2]) corresponding to an SU2×SU2 symmetry, realized mainly by massless pions rather than parity doubling. Some applications of the proposed commutation relations are given, mainly to the pseudoscalar mesons, and other applications are indicated.

Market Structure and Innovation

Abstract: I. Introduction, 395.—II. The model, 397.—III. Competitive entry and long-run equilibrium, 402.—IV. Welfare analysis of industry equilibria, 405.—V. Conclusion, 408.