Politicians' Motivation, Political Culture, and Electoral Competition

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians' incentives to behave opportunistically increase with politicians' pay and with polarization of policy preferences. Moreover, politicians may have stronger incentives to behave opportunistically if other politicians are more likely to behave opportunistically. A political culture may therefore be self-reinforcing and multiple equilibria may arise. Lastly, we show that the mere probability that politicians care about the public interest enables opportunistic politicians to damage the reputation of their competitors. Consequently, efficient policies may be reversed

Product Market Competition and Trade Union Structure

Trade unions tend to reduce the dispersion of wages among their members. Skilled workers may therefore have an incentive to separate from an encompassing union and organize into a separate craft union. In this paper, we examine a theoretical model to gain insight into the determinants of the number of trade unions at a firm. We show that imperfect competition in the product market may drive skilled and unskilled workers together, even though unskilled workers use their political power in the trade union to extract rents from the skilled workers. Additionally, we examine the influence of several features of production technology on trade union structure

Sequential Advocacy

The collection of information necessary fordecision-making is often delegated to agents (e.g. bureaucrats,advisors, lawyers). If both the pros and cons of a decision haveto be examined, it is better to use competing agents instead of asingle agent. The reason is that two conflicting pieces ofinformation cancel each other out. Using two agents, eachsearching for one cause yields full information collection atminimum costs. This provides a rationale for advocacy in politicaland judicial systems. In this paper, we provide a rationale forthe sequential nature of information collection in advocacysystems. If two agents search simultaneously, the incentive tocontinue searching is affected by the information found by theother agent. This forces the principal to leave rents to theagents. If agents search sequentially, the reward can be madeconditional on the information found in earlier stages. Thisreduces the cost of information collection. However, sequential advocacyimplies either a more sluggish decision-making processor a less-informed decision.Information collection; advocates; sequential; budgetary process

Viral pathogenesis, modulation of immune receptor signaling and treatment.

During the co-evolution of viruses and their hosts, the latter have equipped themselves with an elaborate immune system to defend themselves from the invading viruses. In order to establish a successful infection, replicate and persist in the host, viruses have evolved numerous strategies to counter and evade host antiviral immune responses as well as exploit them for productive viral replication. These strategies include those that target immune receptor transmembrane signaling. Uncovering the exact molecular mechanisms underlying these critical points in viral pathogenesis will not only help us understand strategies used by viruses to escape from the host immune surveillance but also reveal new therapeutic targets for antiviral as well as immunomodulatory therapy. In this chapter, based on our current understanding of transmembrane signal transduction mediated by multichain immune recognition receptors (MIRRs) and the results of sequence analysis, we discuss the MIRR-targetingviral strategies of immune evasion and suggest their possible mechanisms that, in turn, reveal new points of antiviral intervention. We also show how two unrelated enveloped viruses, human immunodeficiency virus and human cytomegalovirus, use a similar mechanism to modulate the host immune response mediated by two functionally different MIRRs-T-cell antigen receptor and natural killer cell receptor, NKp30. This suggests that it is very likely that similar general mechanisms can be or are used by other viral and possibly nonviral pathogens