Inventory Signals

How does operational competence translate into market value, when firms cannot credibly communicate their competence to the market? I consider the example of inventory and fill rates. When the market sees a high-inventory firm, it cannot tell whether the inventory is due to incompetence or a strategy to enhance fill rate. Firms might decide to signal their competence to the market by carrying less inventory. I show conditions for separating and pooling perfect Bayesian equilibria. I also provide empirical evidence for this theory that inventory has a signaling role. The theory could potentially provide a framework that describes one way in which a range of operational competences such as purchasing and outsourcing, translate to market value. Practically, it has implications for firms, such as how to strategically communicate to the market, reward managers, or even whether to go public and be subject to market pressures

Primary emotions in patients after myocardial infarction

Aims. This paper reports a study testing the reliability and validity of the Emotion and Health Scale and to check convergent and discriminant validity against the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Background. Reactions to illness are often measured in the narrow terms of anxiety and depression. Primary emotions are claimed by the functionalist school of psychology to be adaptive and to produce specific behaviours for survival. The functionalist theory requires testing in the context of health threat and adaptation. This paper is concerned with the development of a 24-item self-assessment scale of eight primary emotions. Methods. A healthy cohort of 150 university students was enrolled to complete the Health and Emotion Scale. A cohort of 80 first-time myocardial infarction patients was enrolled to complete the Emotion and Health Scale and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale four days after the onset of myocardial infarction or when symptoms were controlled. The data were collected in 2002. Results. The Emotion and Health Scale was shown to have acceptable internal consistency. Significant differences were observed between the healthy and myocardial infarction cohorts in illness attributed sadness, anger, disgust and surprise. Healthy men had significantly more health fear than women. Conclusions. The Emotion and Health Scale is a valid and reliable instrument that could be used to study emotion and illness. This line of enquiry may improve understanding of illness reactions and the role primary emotions exert on adaptation to health change

An oligopurine sequence bias occurs in eukaryotic viruses.

Twenty four DNA and RNA viral nucleotide sequences, comprising over 346 kilobases, have been analyzed for the occurrence of strings of contiguous purine or pyrimidine residues. On average strings greater than or equal to 10 contiguous purines or pyrimidines are found three and a half times more frequently than would be expected for a random distribution of bases. Detailed analysis of the 172 kilobase Epstein-Barr viral sequence shows that the bias in favor of contiguous purine residues increases with the length of the purine string. These findings are similar to those seen for genomic DNA from higher eukaryotes. In contrast no overrepresentation of oligopurine or oligopyrimidine strings is observed in 52 kilobases from eight bacteriophage and E. coli DNA sequences