Department of History

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

Outsourcing of research is commonly observed in knowledge-intensive industries such as biotech. We model innovation as an ambiguous stochastic process with dynamically consistent updating. We assume that the research labs are less ambiguity averse than the commercial firms. We characterize the optimal sequence of short-term contracts governing innovation, and show how it facilitates ambiguity-sharing. This ambiguity sharing agreement mitigates the dynamic moral hazard problem, resulting in monotonically decreasing investment and preventing equilibrium delay. Compared to an ambiguity-neutral policymaker's benchmark, the research alliances stop experimenting too early, and may liquidate the project even after being patented. The problems are structural, redesigned patent laws cannot solve both of these problems.

Department of Economics

Fulltext

Games and Economic Behavior

Dynamic contracting for innovation under ambiguity

We introduce the concept of an Arrowian social equilibrium that inverts the schemata of the famous impossibility theorem of Arrow (1950. "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare."Journal of Political Economy 58 (4): 328-46) and captures the possibility of aggregating non-rational individual preferences into rational social preferences while respecting the Arrowian desiderata. Specifically, we consider individuals whose preferences may not be complete and who, accordingly, may be indecisive when faced with an issue. Breaking with tradition, we consider the possibility of such individuals drawing on their beliefs about society's preferences that result from the aggregation process to resolve their indecisiveness. Formally, individual choices are modeled as a rational shortlist method (Manzini and Mariotti 2007. "Sequentially Rationalizable Choice."The American Economic Review 97 (5): 1824-39), with own preferences followed by society's as the pair of ordered rationales. This results in a mutual interaction between individual and social choices. We study this interaction using majority rule as the aggregator, with an Arrowian social equilibrium specifying how individual and social choices are co-determined, while requiring the latter to be rational. Our main result identifies minimal levels of societal indecisiveness needed to guarantee the existence of such equilibrium.

World University root node

The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics

Arrowian Social Equilibrium: Indecisiveness, Influence and Rational Social Choices under Majority Rule

Public borrowing is essential to garner resources to combat the current pandemic. The ability to do so and adhere to the standard norms of debt sustainability will be harder for developing economies as compared to the developed, due to constraints, both structural and policy-induced. High food inflation and the adoption of inflation targeting will impose severe constraints on the ability to expand borrowing and maintain low levels of debt-to-GDP. In such a situation, governments must either rethink monetary policy and/or allow for debt ratios to rise.

Centre for Economic Data and Analysis

Inflation, Debt Sustainability, and Government Borrowing in the Time of the Pandemic

We extend expansion formulas of Liu given in 2013 to the context of multiple series over root systems. Liu and others have shown the usefulness of these formulas in Special Functions and number-theoretic contexts. We extend Wang and Ma's generalizations of Liu's work which they obtained using q-Lagrange inversion. We use the&nbsp;<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><msub is="true"><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">A</mi></mrow><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">n</mi></mrow></msub></math>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><msub is="true"><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">C</mi></mrow><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">n</mi></mrow></msub></math>&nbsp;Bailey transformation and other summation theorems due to Gustafson, Milne, Milne and Lilly, and others, from the theory of&nbsp;<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><msub is="true"><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">A</mi></mrow><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">n</mi></mrow></msub></math>,&nbsp;<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><msub is="true"><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">C</mi></mrow><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">n</mi></mrow></msub></math>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><msub is="true"><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">D</mi></mrow><mrow is="true"><mi is="true">n</mi></mrow></msub></math>&nbsp;basic <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/hypergeometric-series">hypergeometric series</a>.

Department of Mathematics

Advances in Applied Mathematics

Expansion formulas for multiple basic hypergeometric series over root systems

In this article, an anthropologist and a psychiatrist examine a Sufi shrine-based concept of affliction known as asrat (an “effect” in Hindi-Urdu, “difficulty” in Arabic) and related practices of healing in urban north India. Rather than being located in an individual body, asrat afflictions are shared, most often within a household or kinship group. Through surveys, clinical assessments, and ethnographic work, we track three different ways in which afflictions move between bodies, and the mechanisms at work in asrat healing processes. Rather than a “collectivist” concept of the psyche, we suggest that a key role of shrine-based therapeutic processes is to manage a “suspicion system,” related to experiences of psychic and economic injuries and conflict between intimates and kin. Through a multi-sited research design that moves across a leading Sufi shrine, an urban poor neighborhood in Delhi, and one of India's leading psychiatric facilities, we argue that within asrat-related processes, psychic vulnerabilities are addressed by “re-combining” relations through forms of inter-subjective attunement within a smaller segment of the kin group, potentially making symptoms and the burden of care and conflict more livable. We suggest that shrine-based concepts and practices may be cross-culturally significant, even for secular understandings of the inter-subjective dimensions of mental illness.

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Transcultural Psychiatry

The contagion of mental illness: Insights from a Sufi shrine

Many school children in ethnically diverse countries live in multilingual environments where the medium of instruction in school differs from their mother tongue. We conduct a field experiment in a multiethnic village in northern India to study the relative importance of linguistic distance and neighborhood isolation in the acquisition of language and mathematics skills in elementary school. The village has two sizable ethnic groups speaking languages very different from the medium of school instruction. Students attempt a set of mazes and take tests in reading and mathematics. We find that performance in language-dependent tasks relative to mazes is lower for children whose mother tongue is different from the medium of instruction only if their ethnic group is also residentially segregated. Language policy in most countries has traditionally favored either mother-tongue instruction or assimilation into mainstream language and culture. Our results suggest that there may be value in a more nuanced approach that flexibly combines some instructional support in a mother tongue for those who need it, with policies that encourage contact with speakers of dominant languages to benefit from peers and social networks.

Review of Development Economics

Language and learning in ethnically mixed communities

Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of which number is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of notation. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between the notations acceptable for computation, the usual idealizations involved in theories of computability, flowing from Alan Turing’s monumental work, and de re propositional attitudes toward numbers and other mathematical objects. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Department of Philosophy

Philosophies

Computability, Notation, and de re Knowledge of Numbers

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are often criticized for being susceptible to adversarial attacks. Most successful defense strategies adopt adversarial training or random input transformations that typically require retraining or finetuning the model to achieve reasonable performance. In this work, our investigations of intermediate representations of a pre-trained DNN lead to an interesting discovery pointing to intrinsic robustness to adversarial attacks. We find that we can learn a generative classifier by statistically characterizing the neural response of an intermediate layer to clean training samples. The predictions of multiple such intermediate-layer based classifiers, when aggregated, show unexpected robustness to adversarial attacks. Specifically, we devise an ensemble of these generative classifiers that rank-aggregates their predictions via a Borda count-based consensus. Our proposed approach uses a subset of the clean training data and a pre-trained model, and yet is agnostic to network architectures or the adversarial attack generation method. We show extensive experiments to establish that our defense strategy achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet validation set.

Department of Computer Science

2022 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)

REGroup: Rank-aggregating Ensemble of Generative Classifiers for Robust Predictions

How do students decide what major to study and what explains the low enrolment of women in science and economics? Using data on the subjective expectations of undergraduate students who are in the process of selecting a major, we model major choice as a function of major-specific and job-specific attributes. We identify significant gender differences in the preferences for different attributes as well as in the expectations of future outcomes, especially of grades. Women are willing to pay twice as much as men for course enjoyment and higher grades, even as they expect lower grades in science and economics. This suggests that in addition to gender differences in preferences being shaped by pervasive norms about which subjects are considered more suitable for women, women also suffer from a relative confidence gap in their major-specific abilities.

Oxford Economic Papers

Preferences or expectations: understanding the gender gap in major choice

How do students decide what major to study and what explains the low enrolment of women in science and economics? Using data on the subjective expectations of undergraduate students who are in the process of selecting a major, we model major choice as a function of major-specific and job-specific attributes. We identify significant gender differences in the preferences for different attributes as well as in the expectations of future outcomes, especially of grades. Women are willing to pay twice as much as men for course enjoyment and higher grades, even as they expect lower grades in science and economics. This suggests that in addition to gender differences in preferences being shaped by pervasive norms about which subjects are considered more suitable for women, women also suffer from a relative confidence gap in their major-specific abilities.&nbsp;