International Price-Fixing Cartels and Developing Countries: A Discussion of Effects and Policy Remedies

The U.S. Department of Justice, the European Commission, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have all recently voiced concern about international price- fixing cartels. The U.S. and European Union have increased prosecution of international cartels in the past decade, but very few developing countries have made similar enforcement efforts. If these cartels have significant effects on developing country consumers and producers, the lack of antitrust prosecutions by developing countries against these cartels is an important problem. Geographically limited prosecut ions may not provide sufficient disincentives to deter collusion that has worldwide benefits for colluding firms. Ongoing prosecutions of international cartels by industrialized countries may open up markets for entry by developing country producers, but these efforts may be undermined if cartels create durable barriers to entry. Western governments are also susceptible to manipulation by domestic producers using tariff barriers and anti- dumping duties to protect the home market, both during and after the price- fixing conspiracy. Thus, developing countries may need to develop their own antitrust laws and enforcement capabilities to help deter international cartel activity. A recent ruling of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals also opens up the possibility that developing country consumers may be able to exact remedies in U.S. courts. In this paper we examine the possible effects of private international cartels on developing countries by looking in detail at three recent cartel cases, as well as at a broader cross- section of forty- two recently prosecuted international cartels. We discuss the indirect effects on developing country producers, either as competitors or co- conspirators, as well the direct effects of cartels on developing country consumers. By combining trade data with a sample of US and European prosecutions of international cartels in the 1990s, we are able to make a first attempt at quantifying the order of magnitude of the consequences of these cartels on developing countries as consumers. In 1997, the latest year for which we have trade data, developing countries imported $54.7 billion of goods from a sub - sample of 19 industries that had seen a price- fixing conspiracy during the 1990s. These imports represented 5.2% of total imports and 1.2% of GDP in developing countries.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39923/2/wp538.pd

Right On Time Distributed Shared Memory

The demand for real-time data storage in distributed control systems (DCSs) is growing. Yet, providing real- time DCS guarantees is challenging, especially when more and more sensor and actuator devices are connected to industrial plants and message loss needs to be taken into account. In this paper, we investigate how to build a shared memory abstraction for DCSs as a first step towards implementing different shared storage systems in a DCS context. We first prove that, in the presence of host crashes and message losses, the necessary guarantees of such an abstraction are impossible to implement using a traditional approach that has no access to the internals of existing DCS services, e.g., a modular approach where algorithms are built on top of existing software blocks like failure detectors. We propose a white-box approach that utilizes messages of existing services in any DCS as the sole means of communication. More precisely, we present TapeWorm, an algorithm that attaches itself to the heartbeat messages of the failure detector component in DCSs. We prove that TapeWorm implements the desired shared memory guarantees for applications running on a DCS. We also analyze the performance of TapeWorm and we showcase ways of adapting TapeWorm to various application needs and workloads

Never Say Never Probabilistic & Temporal Failure Detectors (Extended)

The failure detector approach for solving distributed computing problems has been celebrated for its modularity. This approach allows the construction of algorithms using abstract failure detection mechanisms, defined by axiomatic properties, as building blocks. The minimal synchrony assumptions on communication, which enable to implement the failure detection mechanism, are studied separately. Such synchrony assumptions are typically expressed as eventual guarantees that need to hold, after some point in time, forever and deterministically. But in practice, they never do. Synchrony assumptions may hold only probabilistically and temporarily. In this paper, we study failure detectors in a realistic distributed system N, with asynchrony inflicted by probabilistic synchronous communication. We address the following paradox about the weakest failure detector to solve the consensus problem (and many equivalent problems), i.e., S: an implementation of “consensus with probability 1” is possible in N without using randomness in the algorithm itself, while an implementation of “S with probability 1” is impossible to achieve in N. We circumvent this paradox by introducing a new failure detector S*, a variant of S with probabilistic and temporal accuracy. We prove that S* is implementable in N and we provide an optimal S* implementation. Interestingly, we show that S* can replace S , in several existing deterministic consensus algorithms using S, to yield an algorithm that solves “consensus with probability 1”. In fact, we show that such result holds for all decisive problems (not only consensus) and also for failure detector P (not only S). The resulting algorithms combine the modularity of distributed computing practices with the practicality of networking ones

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Learning for a bonus: How financial incentives interact with preferences

This paper investigates the effect of financial incentives on student performance and analyzes for the first time how the incentive effect in education is moderated by students' time preferences. To examine this effect, we use real labor market incentive programs that we combine with data from experiments on time preferences. We find not only that students who are offered financial incentives for better grades have on average better first- and second-year grade point averages but also, more strikingly, that highly impatient students respond more strongly to financial incentives than relatively patient students. This finding suggests that financial incentives are most effective at the beginning of an educational program, when real labor market benefits are in the distant future