University of Oxford

About: University of Oxford is a education organization based out in Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 99713 authors who have published 258108 publications receiving 12972806 citations. The organization is also known as: Oxford University & Oxon..

Violence, bribery, and fraud: the political economy of elections in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: Post-Soviet African democratization has introduced elections into contexts that often lack restraints upon the behavior of candidates, resulting in the emergence of voter intimidation, vote-buying, and ballot fraud. We propose a model of electoral competition where, although some voters oppose violence, it is effective in intimidating swing voters. We show that in equilibrium a weak challenger will use violence, which corresponds to a terrorism strategy. Similarly, a nationally weak incumbent will use repression. However, a stronger incumbent facing local competition will prefer to use bribery or ballot fraud. We discuss the applicability of the model to several African elections.

Submentalizing: I Am Not Really Reading Your Mind.

Abstract: The nativist view of mentalizing—the view that humans have an inherent capacity to think about the mental states of others—has been recently reinvigorated by reports that adults and infants automat...

Optimal Distributed Control of Reactive Power via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

Abstract: We formulate the control of reactive power generation by photovoltaic inverters in a power distribution circuit as a constrained optimization that aims to minimize reactive power losses subject to finite inverter capacity and upper and lower voltage limits at all nodes in the circuit. When voltage variations along the circuit are small and losses of both real and reactive powers are small compared to the respective flows, the resulting optimization problem is convex. Moreover, the cost function is separable enabling a distributed, on-line implementation with node-local computations using only local measurements augmented with limited information from the neighboring nodes communicated over cyber channels. Such an approach lies between the fully centralized and local policy approaches previously considered. We explore protocols based on the dual ascent method and on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and find that the ADMM protocol performs significantly better.