On Competition and the Strategic Management of Intellectual Property in Oligopoly

An innovative firm with private information about its indivisible process innovation chooses strategically whether to apply for a patent with probabilistic validity or rely on secrecy. By doing so, the firm manages its rivals’ beliefs about the size of the innovation, and affects the incentives in the product market. A Cournot competitor tends to patent big innovations, and keep small innovations secret, while a Bertrand competitor adopts the reverse strategy. Increasing the number of firms gives a greater (smaller) patenting incentive for Cournot (Bertrand) competitors. Increasing the degree of product substitutability increases the incentives to patent the innovation

Verifying termination and error-freedom of logic programs with block declarations

We present verification methods for logic programs with delay declarations. The verified properties are termination and freedom from errors related to built-ins. Concerning termination, we present two approaches. The first approach tries to eliminate the well-known problem of speculative output bindings. The second approach is based on identifying the predicates for which the textual position of an atom using this predicate is irrelevant with respect to termination. Three features are distinctive of this work: it allows for predicates to be used in several modes; it shows that block declarations, which are a very simple delay construct, are sufficient to ensure the desired properties; it takes the selection rule into account, assuming it to be as in most Prolog implementations. The methods can be used to verify existing programs and assist in writing new programs

Observation weights unlock bulk RNA-seq tools for zero inflation and single-cell applications

Dropout events in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) cause many transcripts to go undetected and induce an excess of zero read counts, leading to power issues in differential expression (DE) analysis. This has triggered the development of bespoke scRNA-seq DE methods to cope with zero inflation. Recent evaluations, however, have shown that dedicated scRNA-seq tools provide no advantage compared to traditional bulk RNA-seq tools. We introduce a weighting strategy, based on a zero-inflated negative binomial model, that identifies excess zero counts and generates gene-and cell-specific weights to unlock bulk RNA-seq DE pipelines for zero-inflated data, boosting performance for scRNA-seq