Studies of political persuasion often use an exogenous encouragement as an instrument for persuasive messaging. However, for some people, such encouragement is insufficient, while for others, it is unnecessary. These individuals are excluded from methods that only estimate a treatment effect among compliers. Using the marginal treatment effect framework, we extend research finding that exposure to West German television increases support for communism. We find that, because of self-selection, for those who watch West German TV regardless of signal quality, i.e. always-takers, cutting off West German television would have increased support for communism. Our extrapolation shows that media choices reinforce, rather than mollify, political preferences.

In this paper we present a robust real-time optimization method for the online linear oilblending process. The blending process consists in determining the optimal mix ofcomponents so that the final product satisfies a set of specifications. We examinedifferent sources of uncertainty inherent to the blending process and show how to addressthis uncertainty applying the Robust Optimization techniques. The polytopal structure ofour problem permits a simplified robust approach. Our method is intended to avoidreblending and we measure its performance in terms of the blend quality giveaway andfeedstocks prices. The difference between the nominal and the robust optimal values (theprice of robustness) provides a benchmark for the cost of reblending which is difficult toestimate in practice. This new information can be used to adjust the level of conservatismin the model. We analyze the feasibility of a blend to be produced from a set offeedstocks when the heel of a previous blend is used in the composition of the new blend.Additional critical information for the control system is then produced.