A guaranteed immediate payout reduces impatience of financially constrained individuals

A large stream of literature found that individuals who experience financial strain are particularly concerned about their present needs—that is, they are more likely to choose smaller immediate payoffs over larger future payoffs. In contrast, some recent findings suggest that financially constrained individuals may be more concerned about future needs instead (e.g., they are relatively more likely to invest in long-lived durables than in short-lived experiences). We propose that the use of traditional intertemporal choice tasks has made prior studies overly sensitive to the myopia-inducing effects of financial constraint. These tasks typically offer a choice between receiving a smaller payoff in the present versus a larger payoff in the future. Across three studies, we observe that, as long as some immediate payout is guaranteed, financially constrained individuals are as likely as nonconstrained individuals to accept a delay for a larger payoff. These findings qualify prior demonstrations of the myopic effects of financial constraint and suggest that the traditionally used choice paradigm might not accurately capture time preferences, particularly for financially constrained individuals. Furthermore, they provide possible interventions for those interested in reducing the myopia of financially constrained individuals who are facing all now versus all later decisions.

A Cop and Drunken Robber Game on n-DimensionalInfinite-Grid Graphs

A Cop and Drunken Robber (CDR) game is one variation of a famous combinatorial game, called Cops and Robbers, which has been extensively studied and applied in the area of theoretical and computer science as demonstrated by several conferences and publications. In this paper, for a natural number n, we present two strategies for a single cop to chase a drunken robber on n-dimensional infinite-grid graphs. Both strategies show that if the initial distance between the cop and the drunken robber is s, then the expected capture time is s+o(s).

Modeling System Risk in the South African Insurance sector: A Dynamic Mixture Copula Approach

In this study, a dynamic mixture copula is used to estimate the marginal expected shortfall in the South African insurance sector. While other studies assumed nonlinear dependence to be static over time, our model capture time-varying nonlinear dependence between institutions and the market. In order to capture time-varying nonlinear dependence, the generalized autoregressive score (GAS) is used to model the dynamic copula parameters. Furthermore, our study implements a ranking that expresses to what degree individual insurers are systemically important in South Africa. We use daily stock return of five South African insurers listed in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) from November 13, 2007 to June 15, 2020. We find that Sanlam and Discovery contribute the most to systemic risk, while Santam is found to be the least contributor to the overall systemic risk in the South African insurance sector. Our findings would be of paramount importance for the South African regulators as they would be informed that not only banks are systemically important, but some insurers also are systemically important financial institutions. Hence, stricter regulation of these institutions in the form of higher capital and loss absorbency requirements could be required based on the individual business activities undertaken by the company.

Art and politics within the structure of modernity

The object of this research is the situation of permanent modernity, interpreted as a phenomenon of culture, the ontology and dynamics of which is in the subject reviewed in Cartesian-Quantum tradition: as a free, creative, avocational individual who relies upon his own reason, answering the sapere aude enlightenment call, understanding the games of the micro-power (M. Foucault) and liberated from the power of the Big Other (J. Lacan), i.e. consciously and independently constructing own selfhood, Self=Self (J. Fichte), Self speaks of Self (J. Lacan); and through Self realizing cognition and creation of surrounding sociocultural space, where art and politics become the symptom and form of interaction between the subject and permanence of time. Leaning on the theoretical concepts of A. V. Pavlov, J. Lacan, A. Badiou and J. Rancière, the author examines the relations between art and politics within the structure of permanent modernity. The conclusion is made that modernity and postmodernity, civilization and culture, Intercivilizational era (A. V. Pavlov) are the forms of dynamics of permanent modernity, the attempts to capture Time (phenomenal, mental, cultural, conveyed from one subject to another in horizontality and verticality of time (physical phenomenon). Art is a symptom that speaks of the state of Time and assists the cognition of truth of the singular and plural, flowing into the politics – the procedure of mass affiliation to the truth of emancipation of human beings, the key processes of which are the fight for equality and freedom.