Antitrust and Regulation

Since the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act (1897) and the Sherman Act (1890), regulation and antitrust have operated as competing mechanisms to control competition. Regulation produced cross-subsidies and favors to special interests, but specified prices and rules of mandatory dealing. Antitrust promoted competition without favoring special interests, but couldn't formulate rules for particular industries. The deregulation movement reflected the relative competencies of antitrust and regulation. Antitrust and regulation can also be viewed as complements in which regulation and antitrust assign control of competition to courts and regulatory agencies based on their relative strengths. Antitrust also can act as a constraint on what regulators can do. This paper uses the game-theoretic framework of political bargaining and the historical record of antitrust and regulation to establish and illustrate these points.

Gale Crater - Why are We There and What do We Hope to Learn?

The Mars Science Laboratory Rover Curiosity is commencing a two-year investigation of Gale crater and Mt. Sharp, the craters prominent central mound. Gale is a 155 km, late Noachian/early Hesperian impact crater located near the dichotomy boundary separating the southern highlands from the northern plains. The central mound is composed of layered sedimentary rock, with upper and lower mound units separated by a prominent erosional unconformity. The lower mound is of particular interest, as it contains secondary minerals indicative of a striking shift from water-rich to water-poor conditions on early Mars. A key unknown in the history of Gale is the relationship between the sedimentary units in the mound and sedimentary sequences in the surrounding region. We employed orbital remote sensing data to determine if areas within a 1,000 km radius of Gale match the characteristics of sedimentary units in Mt. Sharp. Regions of interest were defined based on: the mound s inferred age, altitude range, and THEMIS nighttime brightness (a proxy for thermal inertia). Using orbital CTX, MOC and HiRISE images we examined all areas within our regions of interest for analogous geomorphic units in the same altitude ranges as the corresponding units in Mt. Sharp. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that sedimentary units in both the upper and lower sections of the Gale mound are related to nearby regional units located along the dichotomy boundary. This relationship supports an inferred geologic history that includes several episodes of widespread sedimentary deposition and erosion in the martian mid-latitudes. In this model Mt. Sharp is the remnant of regional sedimentary deposits that partially or completely filled the crater, became lithified, and were subsequently deeply eroded. Key questions that will be addressed by Curiosity include the compositions of the sediments, the modes of deposition, the mechanisms of lithification, and the nature of the erosion

Operational Discord Measure for Gaussian States with Gaussian Measurements

We introduce an operational discord-type measure for quantifying nonclassical correlations in bipartite Gaussian states based on using Gaussian measurements. We refer to this measure as operational Gaussian discord (OGD). It is defined as the difference between the entropies of two conditional probability distributions associated to one subsystem, which are obtained by performing optimal local and joint Gaussian measurements. We demonstrate the operational significance of this measure in terms of a Gaussian quantum protocol for extracting maximal information about an encoded classical signal. As examples, we calculate OGD for several Gaussian states in the standard form.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure