New product introduction and diffusion with costly search

Will the low search cost in the new economy help speed up new product introduction? The usual model of product market search suggests that a low search cost can turn out to have detrimental incentives on innovation and new product introduction as the low search cost erodes firms' market power, attenuating the profit from innovation. This usual model, however, misses the important dimension of product market search that how often it pays to search depends on the magnitude of the search cost. This paper studies a model of monopolistic competition with costly search, where the point of departure is that of a fixed cost of a shopping trip. With this fixed cost, the optimal search frequency is tied to the magnitude of the search cost. In this environment, a low search cost could turn out to be favorable to innovation. At a low search cost, consumers search more often, speeding up the diffusion of new products and possibly resulting in higher profits for firms, despite the erosion of market power.product market search, innovation, new product introduction

Monomial, Gorenstein and Bass Orders

In this article we study a class of orders called {\it monomial orders} in a central simple algebra over a non-Archimedean local field. Monomial orders are easily represented and they may be also viewed as a direct generalization of Eichler orders in quaternion algebras. A criterion for monomial orders to be Gorenstein or to be Bass is given. It is shown that a monomial order is Bass if and only if it is either a hereditary or an Eichler order of period two.Comment: 13 pages; fix typos in the proof of Theorem 3.

Supersingular abelian surfaces and Eichler class number formula

Let $F$ be a totally real field with ring of integers $O_F$, and $D$ be a totally definite quaternion algebra over $F$. A well-known formula established by Eichler and then extended by K\"orner computes the class number of any $O_F$-order in $D$. In this paper we generalize the Eichler class number formula so that it works for arbitrary $\mathbb{Z}$-orders in $D$. The motivation is to count the isomorphism classes of supersingular abelian surfaces in a simple isogeny class over a prime finite field $\mathbb{F}_p$. We give explicit formulas for the number of these isomorphism classes for all primes $p$.Comment: 29 pages, 3 numerical tables, shortened revised version with same results, Sections 7-9 of v2 are remove

Development, Implementation, And Evaluation Of An End Of Life Care Online Module For Pre-Clinical Students

Basic palliative and end-of-life care skills are necessary for all physicians regardless of their field of specialty. Education should begin during the early stages of medical training, as early as medical school, to ensure that all physicians acquire a basic understanding of these aspects of medical care. At the Yale School of Medicine, the End-of-Life and Palliative Care Curriculum was formalized in 2008 to address this need and was expanded in 2012 to include an original educational online module. This new module was designed specifically for second-year medical students, who had the opportunity to visit hospice patients but do not have dedicated learning prior, to introduce them to specific topics in end-of-life and palliative care in preparation for third-year clerkship rotations during which they are likely to encounter and care for dying patients. Life, Death & Medicine: The Dying Process, Hospice Care, and Terminal Care was developed as a 30-45 minute interactive web-based module that focused on three topics: 1) the physiological signs and stages of the dying process; 2) the common terminal symptoms and their treatments; and 3) the eligibility and services of hospice care. The educational content is literature-based with reference citations embedded within the module. Several interactive features augment this online module, including multiple-choice questions with individualized feedback, drag-and-drop pairing exercises, video clips, and supplementary materials accessed via web-links. To evaluate the effectiveness of the module, a knowledge-and-attitudes survey was created and administered to second-year Yale medical students randomized to either have or not have access to the module prior to a required half-day hospice/palliative care rotation. A total of 152 students (51% response rate; 62 students in 2012; 66 in 2013; and 24 in 2014) participated in the survey between September 2012 to November 2014, of which 56 students had completed the online module and 85 had not (control group). Multinomial logistic regression was used to analyze the students\u27 knowledge performance based on a series of multiple-choice questions. Multivariate ANOVA was used to analyze the students\u27 attitudes based on their degree of agreement to a series of attitude-assessing statements. Students who completed the online module scored higher (p\u3c.05) on five out of eight of the knowledge-assessing questions. Overall, the students expressed that they felt somewhat uncomfortable caring for dying patients, though they regarded it as part of the physician\u27s duty, and that palliative care education is important in medical curricula. The attitudes did not differ between the students who completed the module and those who did not. Life, Death & Medicine: The Dying Process, Hospice Care, and Terminal Care is a promising tool to introduce pre-clinical medical students to key concepts of terminal care. The application of this online module can be extended to other medical schools to augment teaching of palliative and end-of-life care

Visual stimulation as pain relief for Hong Kong Chinese patients with leg ulcers

Analgesic potential of visual stimulation was examined in 33 patients with leg ulcers in a randomized, controlled, crossover clinical trial. Patients were alternating between wearing an eyeglass display with soundless VCD broadcast (V-sessions) and a static blank screen (B-sessions) while receiving superficial debridement and wound dressing for their leg ulcers. A significant reduction in pain scores was found during V-sessions (VAS 67.7 ± 28.4 vs. 25.6 ± 29.8 when V-sessions vs. B-sessions, with p < 0.01). Age was positively correlated with the improvement in VAS, whereas gender, residency, and the underlying medical conditions were not correlated with the improvement in pain score. The use of visual stimulation might be beneficial to both genders, in an older age group regardless of the underlying medical conditions. This is the pioneer use of visual stimulation as a non-pharmacological adjuvant to pain relief among a local Chinese population. The study will certainly add knowledge to the existing pain relief methods.published_or_final_versio

Comments on "Design and analysis of switched-capacitor-based step-up resonant converters"

Author name used in this publication: Chi K. Tse2005-2006 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Adaptive Circuit Learning of Born Machine: Towards Realization of Amplitude Embedding and Data Loading

With the progress in the quantum algorithm in recent years, much of the existing literature claims the exponential quantum advantage against their classical counterpart. However, many of these successes hinge on the assumption that arbitrary states can be efficiently prepared in quantum circuits. In reality, crafting a circuit to prepare a generic $n$-qubit quantum state demands an operation count on the order of $\mathcal{O}(2^n)$, which is prohibitively demanding for the quantum algorithm to demonstrate its advantage against the classical one. To tackle this data-loading problem, numerous strategies have been put forward. Nonetheless, most of these approaches only consider a very simple and easy-to-implement circuit structure, which has been shown to suffer from serious optimization issues. In this study, we harness quantum circuits as Born machines to generate probability distributions. Drawing inspiration from methods used to investigate electronic structures in quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics, we present a novel algorithm "Adaptive Circuit Learning of Born Machine" (ACLBM) that dynamically expands the ansatz circuit. Our algorithm is tailored to selectively integrate two-qubit entangled gates that best capture the complex entanglement present within the target state. Empirical results underscore the proficiency of our approach in encoding real-world data through amplitude embedding, demonstrating not only compliance with but also enhancement over the performance benchmarks set by previous research.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, 1 tabl