A solution to matching with preferences over colleagues

We study many-to-one matchings, such as the assignment of students to colleges, where the students have preferences over the other students who would attend the same college. It is well known that the core of this model may be empty, without strong assumptions on agents' preferences. We introduce a method that finds all core matchings, if any exist. The method requires no assumptions on preferences. Our method also finds certain partial solutions that may be useful when the core is empty

Human kin detection

Natural selection has favored the evolution of behaviors that benefit not only one's genes, but also their copies in genetically related individuals. These behaviors include optimal outbreeding (choosing a mate that is neither too closely related, nor too distant), nepotism (helping kin), and spite (hurting non-kin at a personal cost), and all require some form of kin detection or kin recognition. Yet, kinship cannot be assessed directly; human kin detection relies on heuristic cues that take into account individuals' context (whether they were reared by our mother, or grew up in our home, or were given birth by our spouse), appearance (whether they smell or look like us), and ability to arouse certain feelings (whether we feel emotionally close to them). The uncertainties of kin detection, along with its dependence on social information, create ample opportunities for the evolution of deception and self-deception. For example, babies carry no unequivocal stamp of their biological father, but across cultures they are passionately claimed to resemble their mother's spouse; to the same effect, neutral' observers are greatly influenced by belief in relatedness when judging resemblance between strangers. Still, paternity uncertainty profoundly shapes human relationships, reducing not only the investment contributed by paternal versus maternal kin, but also prosocial behavior between individuals who are related through one or more males rather than females alone. Because of its relevance to racial discrimination and political preferences, the evolutionary pressure to prefer kin to non-kin has a manifold influence on society at large

Knowledge workers and job satisfaction: Evidence from Europe

This article analyzes the determinants of job satisfaction among knowledge workers (KWs). Data from a representative sample of 14,096 employed workers from the European Social Survey (2010) are used for an empirical analysis drawing on multiple binary logistic regression models. Job satisfaction among KWs in 21 EU countries is found to be explained better by non-financial characteristics than by monetary rewards. Career advancement opportunities, flexible work schedules, colleague support, and work-family relations, as well as job security, emerge as central in explaining job satisfaction among KWs in our sample. Unlike the case for other workers (OWs), opportunities for further training and career experience are not determinants of job satisfaction among KWs. Management divisions in companies employing KWs would be well-advised to take these points into account

Majorana Dark Matter with a Coloured Mediator: Collider vs Direct and Indirect Searches

We investigate the signatures at the Large Hadron Collider of a minimal model where the dark matter particle is a Majorana fermion that couples to the Standard Model via one or several coloured mediators. We emphasize the importance of the production channel of coloured scalars through the exchange of a dark matter particle in the t-channel, and perform a dedicated analysis of searches for jets and missing energy for this model. We find that the collider constraints are highly competitive compared to direct detection, and can even be considerably stronger over a wide range of parameters. We also discuss the complementarity with searches for spectral features at gamma-ray telescopes and comment on the possibility of several coloured mediators, which is further constrained by flavour observables.Comment: 32 pages, 9 figure