Working Paper
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Norm-Based Enforcement of Promises
(2019)There is ample evidence that people are internally motivated to keep their promises. However, it is unclear whether promises alone create a meaningful level of commitment in many economically relevant situations where the stakes are high. In a between- subject design, we ask subjects to imagine they observed as third parties a promisor breaking her promise and could punish the promisor, at a cost to themselves, for her behavior. Our ...Working Paper -
Heterogeneous (Mis-) Perceptions of Energy Costs: Implications for Measurement and Policy Design
(2019)Economics Working Paper SeriesQuantifying heterogeneity in consumers’ misperceptions of product costs is crucial for policy design. We illustrate this point in the energy context and the design of Pigouvian policies. We estimate non-parametric distributions of perceptions of energy costs in the U.S. appliance market using a revealed preference approach. We show that the average degree of misperception is misleading— while the largest share of consumers correctly ...Working Paper -
Are Consumers Attentive to Local Energy Costs? Evidence from the Appliance Market
(2019)Economics Working Paper SeriesWe estimate whether consumers respond to local energy costs when purchasing appliances. Using a dataset from an appliance retailer, we compare demand responsiveness to a measure of energy costs that varies with local energy prices versus purchase prices. We strongly reject that consumers are unresponsive to local energy costs under a wide range of assumptions. These findings run counter to the popular wisdom, which motivates energy ...Working Paper -
The Social Status of Vocational Education and Training in Switzerland
(2019)KOF Working PapersThis paper analyses how the social status of vocational education and training (VET) in Switzerland has changed over time and how it differs across population groups. The applied measure for the social status of VET compares the cognitive abilities (measured by PISA scores) of prospective students in a VET programme to those in an academic baccalaureate programme. The results suggest that the social status of VET has remained constant ...Working Paper -
Sources of knowledge flow between developed and developing nations
(2019)KOF Working PapersThis paper provides a long-term view on the sources of knowledge flow between developed and developing nations. It relies on patent data to explore three potential sources: R&D collaboration, technology sourcing, and technology transfer. All three sources provide a very consistent message. First, knowledge flows with East Asia, particularly China, are occurring more frequently. Second, knowledge flows are increasingly concentrated in ...Working Paper -
Co-detection of micro seismic activity as early warning of gravitational slope failure
(2018)arXivWe developed a new strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction for gravitational slope failure: We propose a simple method for real-time early warning of gravity-driven failures that considers and exploits both the heterogeneity of natural media and characteristics of acoustic emissions attenuation. This method capitalizes on co-detection of elastic waves emanating from micro-cracks by a network of multiple and spatially distributed sensors. ...Working Paper -
A model-based clustering approach for analyzing energy-related financial literacy and its determinants
(2019)Recent research highlights the role of consumer’s energy-related financial literacy in adoption of energy efficient household appliances in order to reduce the energy-efficiency gap within the household sector. The computation of an indicator for such a literacy measure has followed a somewhat less refined approach though. This paper demonstrates the use of a model-based clustering strategy in order to differentiate the population based ...Working Paper -
The +1 Method Model-Free Adaptive Repositioning Policies for Robotic Multi-Agent Systems
(2019)Working Paper -
Decomposing the Margins of Transfer Pricing
(2019)KOF Working PapersThis paper examines the determinants and margins of profit shifting through transferpricing. We develop a theory model, where transfer pricing patterns are governed by a generalized concealment cost function (CCF). Our empirical analysis draws on micro-level data about transaction-level imports, firm-level characteristics, as well as tax differentials between regions in Switzerland and countries abroad. We find, both theoretically and ...Working Paper -
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Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations
(2018)arXivWorking Paper -
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Particle-filtering approaches for nonlinear Bayesian decoding of neuronal spike trains
(2018)arXivThe number of neurons that can be simultaneously recorded doubles every seven years. This ever increasing number of recorded neurons opens up the possibility to address new questions and extract higher dimensional stimuli from the recordings. Modeling neural spike trains as point processes, this task of extracting dynamical signals from spike trains is commonly set in the context of nonlinear filtering theory. Particle filter methods ...Working Paper -
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PRED18: Dataset and Further Experiments with DAVIS Event Camera in Predator-Prey Robot Chasing
(2018)arXivMachine vision systems using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for robotic applications are increasingly being developed. Conventional vision CNNs are driven by camera frames at constant sample rate, thus achieving a fixed latency and power consumption tradeoff. This paper describes further work on the first experiments of a closed-loop robotic system integrating a CNN together with a Dynamic and Active Pixel Vision Sensor (DAVIS) in ...Working Paper -
Propagation of moments in Hawkes networks
(2018)The present paper provides a mathematical description of high-order moments of spiking activity in a recurrently-connected network of Hawkes processes. It extends previous studies that have explored the case of a (linear) Hawkes network driven by deterministic rate functions to the case of a stimulation by external inputs (rate functions or spike trains) with arbitrary correlation structure. Our approach describes the spatio-temporal ...Working Paper -
On the choice of metric in gradient-based theories of brain function
(2018)arXivThe idea that the brain functions so as to minimize certain costs pervades theoretical neuroscience. Since a cost function by itself does not predict how the brain finds its minima, additional assumptions about the optimization method need to be made to predict the dynamics of physiological quantities. In this context, steepest descent (also called gradient descent) is often suggested as an algorithmic principle of optimization potentially ...Working Paper -
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