Matching Items (218)
Description
This paper uses network theory to simulate Nash equilibria for selfish travel within a traffic network. Specifically, it examines the phenomenon of Braess's Paradox, the counterintuitive occurrence in which adding capacity to a traffic network increases the social costs paid by travelers in a new Nash equilibrium. It also employs the measure of the price of anarchy, a ratio between the social cost of the Nash equilibrium flow through a network and the socially optimal cost of travel. These concepts are the basis of the theory behind undesirable selfish routing to identify problematic links and roads in existing metropolitan traffic networks (Youn et al., 2008), suggesting applicative potential behind the theoretical questions this paper attempts to answer. New topologies of networks which generate Braess's Paradox are found. In addition, the relationship between the number of nodes in a network and the number of occurrences of Braess's Paradox, and the relationship between the number of nodes in a network and a network's price of anarchy distribution are studied.
ContributorsChotras, Peter Louis (Author) / Armbruster, Dieter (Thesis director) / Lanchier, Nicolas (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Lipid membranes are a key structure for many classes of viruses. Lipid membranes can be analyzed using the fluid mosaic model, which states that the phospholipid membrane has variable amounts of fluidity and key membrane proteins are presented in areas stabilized by cholesterol-enriched platforms called lipid rafts. This project aims to further the understanding of the importance of lipid rafts in measles virus (MV) infection and replication, which has not been extensively studied. In order to do this, an MV-susceptible cell line was treated with an anti-cholesterol compound before and after measles virus infection. I found that pre-infection treatments had a marginal effect upon measles cytopathic effect (syncytia formation) or replication. Twenty-four hours post-infection treatment had a deleterious effect on cell viability, but the replication/assembly of infectious units per cell decreased importantly and in dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, by measuring the susceptibility to neutralization of infectious particles obtained from MBCD treated cells, I determined the importance of lipid microdomain environment on the stability of infectious particles. Increased anti-cholesterol treatment enhanced the susceptibility of MV to neutralization. Future studies are proposed to assess the properties of cholesterol depleted viral infectious units.
ContributorsYkema, Matthew Ryan (Author) / Mor, Tsafrir (Thesis director) / Jacobs, Bertram (Committee member) / Julik, Emily (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
We model communication among social insects as an interacting particle system in which individuals perform one of two tasks and neighboring sites anti-mimic one another. Parameters of our model are a probability of defection 2 (0; 1) and relative cost ci > 0 to the individual performing task i. We examine this process on complete graphs, bipartite graphs, and the integers, answering questions about the relationship between communication, defection rates and the division of labor. Assuming the division of labor is ideal when exactly half of the colony is performing each task, we nd that on some bipartite graphs and the integers it can eventually be made arbitrarily close to optimal if defection rates are sufficiently small. On complete graphs the fraction of individuals performing each task is also closest to one half when there is no defection, but is bounded by a constant dependent on the relative costs of each task.
ContributorsArcuri, Alesandro Antonio (Author) / Lanchier, Nicolas (Thesis director) / Kang, Yun (Committee member) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
South Mountain is the largest municipal park in the nation. It is a bundled amenity, providing a series of linked services to the surrounding communities. A dataset of 19,209 homes in 155 neighborhoods within three miles of the park was utilized in order to complete a hedonic estimation for two nearby urban villages, Ahwatukee Foothills and South Mountain Village. Measures of access include proximity to the park, trailhead access, and adjacency to the park. Two regressions were estimated, the first including lot characteristics and subdivision fixed effects and the second using the coefficients for each subdivision as the dependent variable. These estimates describe how the location of a house in a subdivision contributes to its conditional mean price. As a result they offer a direct basis for capturing amenities measured at the neighborhood scale on home values. Park proximity, trailhead access and adjacency were found to significantly influence the price of homes at the 5% confidence level in Ahwatukee, but not in South Mountain Village. The results of this study can be applied to issues of environmental justice and park access in determining which areas and attributes of the park are associated with a high premium. Though South Mountain was preserved some time ago, development and future preservation in the City of Phoenix can be informed by such studies.
ContributorsRamakrishna, Saritha Kambhampati (Author) / Abbott, Joshua (Thesis director) / Smith, V. Kerry (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This thesis analyzes budgetary documents of the State of Arizona relating to education spending as well as East Valley school districts to examine the extent of reductions in state funding for K-12 education since the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Previous research has found that Arizona ranks in the very bottom tier of states in education spending. Moreover, Arizona has cut per-pupil spending by a higher percentage than forty-seven other states. To assess the effects of these cuts, I determine both their magnitude in the aggregate as well as their significance to individual school districts. In the first chapter, I explain the school finance formula to provide a foundation for my analysis, scrutinize the last nine budgets of the Arizona Department of Education to measure annual changes in funding, chronicle the inflation-funding lawsuit to gauge the quantity of funds withheld, rather than cut, from schools, and sum the value of reduced and suspended funding to discover the total cost of these decisions. In the second chapter, I compile data from the budgets of East Valley school districts covering the last eight recorded years to discern and compare annual changes in revenue from the state, aggregate teacher salaries, and the number of teachers employed. Looking ahead, the conclusion discusses public opinion on education funding and the enacted budget for the coming fiscal year, FY 2016. In conjunction, these sections convey both a comprehensive history of the decisions made by our public officials that have affected public education in Arizona and an analysis of the consequences of those decisions.
ContributorsStumpf, Austin Robert (Author) / Herrera, Richard (Thesis director) / Jones, Ruth (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Public Affairs (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
According to the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) will provide 26 million households with 60 billion dollars of reduced taxes and refunds in 2015 \u2014 resources that serve to lift millions of families above the federal poverty line. Responding to the popularity of EITC programs and recent discussion of its expansion for childless adults, I select three comparative case studies of state-level EITC reform from 2005 to 2013. Each state represents a different kind of policy reform: the creation of a supplemental credit in Connecticut, credit reduction in New Jersey, and finally credit expansion for childless adults in Maryland. For each case study, I use Current Population Survey panel data from the March Supplement to complete a differences-in-differences (DD) analysis of EITC policy changes. Specifically, I analyze effects of policy reform on total earned income, employment and usual hours worked. For comparison groups, I construct unique counterfactual populations of northeastern U.S. states, using people of color with less than a college degree as my treatment group for their increased sensitivity to EITC policy reform. I find no statistically significant effects of policy creation in Connecticut, significant decreases in employment and hours worked in New Jersey, and finally, significant increases in earnings and hours worked in Maryland. My work supports the findings of other empirical work, suggesting that awareness of new supplemental EITC programs is critical to their effectiveness while demonstrating that these types of programs can affect the labor supply and outcomes of eligible groups.
ContributorsRichard, Katherine Rose (Author) / Dillon, Eleanor Wiske (Thesis director) / Silverman, Daniel (Committee member) / Herbst, Chris (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality in the United States and remains a great public health challenge. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors (e.g., unhealthy diet, sedentary behavior, cigarette smoking, and obesity) are associated with a greater risk of incident CVD and all-cause mortality. From the prevention strategy, maintaining a healthy lifestyle throughout a lifetime is a key to CVD prevention. Nonetheless, the prevalence of healthy lifestyle behaviors in US communities is low as 3 to 5%. Moreover, the prevalence of a healthy population among college students remains unknown. Objective: We investigated the prevalence of healthy lifestyle behaviors among college students. Methods: We recruited 747 undergraduate students from Arizona State University using a survey questionnaire. The survey questionnaire investigated demographic characteristics, body mass index, dietary habits, physical activity habits, and smoking habits. The chi-square test was used to investigate the frequency of ideal lifestyle behaviors in college students. Results: Prevalence of students who met all 4 ideal health behaviors (ideal cardiovascular health) is very low at 7.6%. Approximately 55.7% of students had only 2 or less ideal lifestyle behaviors (poor cardiovascular health). In addition, there were no statistical differences in combined ideal lifestyle behaviors across gender and different years of undergraduate studies. Conclusion: College students had a very low prevalence of healthy lifestyle behaviors. Increasing healthy low-risk students throughout college education is an important strategy to prevent chronic disease morbidity and mortality at individual and population level.
ContributorsConway, Jason Michael (Author) / Lee, Chong (Thesis director) / Angadi, Siddhartha (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Technological advances in the past decade alone are calling for modifications to the usability of various devices. Physical human interaction is becoming a popular method to communicate with user interfaces. This ranges from touch-based devices such as an iPad or tablet to free space gesture systems such as the Microsoft Kinect. With the rise in popularity of these types of devices comes the increased amount of them in public areas. Public areas frequently use walk-up-and-use displays, which give many people the opportunity to interact with them. Walk-up-and-use displays are intended to be simple enough that any individual, regardless of experience using similar technology, will be able to successfully maneuver the system. While this should be easy enough for the people using it, it is a more complicated task for the designers who are in charge of creating an interface simple enough to use while also accomplishing the tasks it was built to complete. A serious issue that I'll be addressing in this thesis is how a system designer knows what gestures to program the interface to successfully respond to. Gesture elicitation is one widely used method to discover common, intuitive, gestures that can be used with public walk-up-and-use interactive displays. In this paper, I present a study to extract common intuitive gestures for various tasks, an analysis of the responses, and suggestions for future designs of interactive, public, walk-up-and use interactions.
ContributorsVan Horn, Sarah Elizabeth (Author) / Walker, Erin (Thesis director) / Danielescu, Andreea (Committee member) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This report will provide an analysis of frontier market equity-based investment funds with respect to bivariate correlation analysis, global integration analysis, and US optimized portfolio statistics. My analysis has indicated strong diversification benefits of including frontier market equities in a US portfolio, given its low correlation to US equity concentrated portfolios especially portfolios that would consist of midcap and smallcap stocks. With the drawbacks of the bivariate correlation test, an additional global integration analysis has been included to reaffirm the value frontier markets offer in the form of integration. Integration is a second layer of the diversification analysis. I find that when analyzing frontier markets (FM) against developed markets (DM) there exhibits significantly less integration as compared to emerging markets against developed markets. This analysis goes one step further and quantifies integration of specific frontier market funds against the broader emerging and developed markets. This study finds that iShares MSCI frontier 100 ETF (Ticker: FM) exhibits the least integration amongst Guggenheim Frontier Markets ETF (Ticker: FRN), Templeton Frontier Markets A (Ticker: TFMAX), and Morgan Stanley Frontier Emg (Ticker: MFMIX). Lastly, this analysis covers the inadequacy with using Sharpe ratios and minimum volatility parameters to achieve portfolio optimization under a Monte-Carlo style 1000 portfolio simulation with frontier market funds in a broader US equity portfolio but finds better results when using a US equity and US bond combination portfolio. Overall, this analysis of frontier markets and frontier market funds has shown there still exists significant diversification benefits to US Investors when they engage in FM investments, specifically through diversified FM investment funds.
ContributorsHardy, Gunner Laine (Author) / Pruitt, Seth (Thesis director) / Brada, Josef (Committee member) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Students in an online course can face diminished incentives to exert effort and focus without the structure of instructor-paced material. To introduce new motivation to spend more time with course material, this paper examines the use of A/B split test content experiments. One group of students is exposed to a set of hidden hyperlinks ("Easter Eggs") within the course and earns trivially small amounts of course credit for finding them. While controlling for demographics and initial effort, finding each additional Easter Egg is associated with a 0.8 percentage point increase in final grade. This effect is even stronger for low performers: for those below the median grade before the first Easter Egg, each find increases final grade by 1.3 points. The treatment advantages low-performing students more than their high-achieving counterparts, thus helping to reduce the education gap at extremely low cost to course developers.
ContributorsWinseck, Kevin Lee (Author) / Hobijn, Bart (Thesis director) / Veramendi, Gregory (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05