Official statistics increasingly make use of higher-frequency time series. But when users ultimately are interested in a seasonally adjusted temporal aggregate of these data, we have to decide whether to perform seasonal adjustment or aggregation first. Consequently, we must weigh up the...

We analyse potential mismeasurement of the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) at the upper level of aggregation, focusing on two sources of measurement error: the choice of index formula (representativity component) and the reliability of weights (data vintage component). The...

Sustainability indices are essential to track development progress and guide policy. They often aggregate diverse dimensions into a composite index, requiring value-based choices about the importance of each dimension (weighting) and the extent to which weaknesses in some area can be offset by...

The chain ladder model is defined by a set of assumptions about the claim array to which it is applied. It is, in practice, applied to claim arrays whose data relate to different frequencies, e.g., yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, etc. There is sometimes a tacit assumption that one can shift...

In the rapidly evolving landscape of data analytics, effective decision-making is paramount. Multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) techniques are widely applied to handle uncertainty and vagueness in diverse fields such as medical diagnosis, social selection, networking, and environmental...

Policy makers express their views and decisions via the lens of a particular model or theory. But since any model is a highly stylized representation of the unknowable object of interest, all these models are inherently misspecified, and the resulting ambiguity injects uncertainty in the...

Energy systems modeling plays a key role in long-term strategic planning. However, some complex constraints are often overlooked in these models, such as public acceptance, leading to systems that are difficult to implement. The Modeling to Generate Alternatives (MGA) method addresses this issue...

Decision-makers sometimes rely on past data to learn statistical relationships between variables. However, when predicting a target variable, they must adjust how they aggregate past information depending on the observables available. If agents have information on all observables, it is optimal...

To consider legal standards in empirical research designs, the qualitative information of the law needs to be transferred in a numerical variable. The challenge in creating such a variable consists in finding the right balance between high information density and transparency while keeping the...

In many professional activities humans are getting better generation by generation. This is supposed to be the case, for instance, in sports and in science. Is it true in the arts? In this paper, we consider violinists from the time period in which audio and video recordings became possible....

We study the aggregation of partial orders into a complete ordering, and prove both possibility and impossibility results in this context. First, we show that the standard independence of irrelevant alternatives condition is stronger here since even dictatorial aggregation rules may fail to...

We reappraise the Arrow problem by studying the aggregation of choice functions. We do so in the general framework of judgment aggregation, in which choice functions are naturally representable by specifying, for each menu A and each alternative x in A, whether x is choosable from A, or not. Our...

We specify the domain in the income distribution that includes the people to whom income transfers will not increase inequality in that income distribution. Inspired by Sen's (1973, 1997) characterization of the Gini coefficient as a ratio between a measure of aggregate income-based "depression"...

This paper develops a mathematical framework to study signal networks, in which nodes can be active or inactive, and their activation or deactivation is driven by external signals and the states of the nodes to which they are connected via links. The focus is on determining the optimal number of...

This paper explores why small area poverty estimates from models at the household level that only use aggregate data as covariates, exhibit systematic bias. The analysis demonstrates that this bias stems from the model's inability to capture the complete between-household variation in welfare,...

This paper develops a bottom-up, sector-specific approach to modeling potential output that overcomes limitations of traditional top-down estimates for long-term projections and policy analysis. The model disaggregates total-factor productivity (TFP) growth into within-sector productivity...

The computational complexity of large-scale networked evolutionary games has become a challenging problem. Based on network aggregation and pinning control methods, this paper investigates the problem of control design for strategy consensus of large-scale networked evolutionary games. The...

This compilers' manual is meant to serve as a practical reference document for all National Statistical Authorities involved in the compilation of aggregated data on EU international trade in goods statistics. As such, it provides the necessary definitions and practical instructions regarding...

Insurance companies need to calculate solvency capital requirements in order to ensure that they can meet their future obligations to policyholders and beneficiaries. The solvency capital requirement is a risk management tool essential for addressing extreme catastrophic events that result in a...