Misdiagnosis of familial Mediterranean fever in patients with Anderson-Fabry disease

Fabry disease (FD) is an underdiagnosed pathology due to its symptomatology that overlaps with various systemic and rheumatic disorders, including familial Mediterranean fever (FMF). We examined the Mediterranean fever (MEFV) and α-galactosidase A (GLA) genes, whose mutations are responsible for FMF and FD, respectively, in 42 unrelated patients diagnosed with FMF, which revealed significant ambiguity regarding some of the symptoms which are also present in FD. The objective of this study was to determine the spectrum of mutations present in these genes, in order to identify cases of mistaken diagnosis of FMF and/or missed diagnosis of FD. Ten out of 42 patients had one mutation in homozygosis or two different mutations in heterozygosis in the MEFV gene; 20/42 had a single heterozygous mutation, and 12/42 did not have genetic alterations in MEFV. The analysis of the GLA gene conducted on all the samples revealed that three subjects, and some members of their families, had two different exonic mutations associated with FD. Family studies allowed us to identify eight other cases of FD, bringing the total undiagnosed subjects to 11/53. Analyzing the MEFV and GLA genes in patients with clinical diagnoses of FMF proved to be fundamentally important for the reduction of diagnostic errors

Inattentive Consumers in Markets for Services

In an experiment on markets for services, we find that consumers are likely to stick to default tariffs and achieve suboptimal outcomes. We find that inattention to the task of choosing a better tariff is likely to be a substantial problem in addition to any task and tariff complexity effect. The institutional setup on which we primarily model our experiment is the UK electricity and gas markets, and our conclusion is that the new measures by the UK regulator Ofgem to improve consumer outcomes are likely to be of limited impact

Social preferences, accountability, and wage bargaining

We assess the extent of preferences for employment in a collective wage bargaining situation with heterogeneous workers. We vary the size of the union and introduce a treatment mechanism transforming the voting game into an individual allocation task. Our results show that highly productive workers do not take employment of low productive workers into account when making wage proposals, regardless of whether insiders determine the wage or all workers. The level of pro-social preferences is small in the voting game, while it increases as the game is transformed into an individual allocation task. We interpret this as an accountability effect

On reminder effects, drop-outs and dominance: evidence from an online experiment on charitable giving

We present the results of an experiment that (a) shows the usefulness of screening out drop-outs and (b) tests whether different methods of payment and reminder intervals affect charitable giving. Following a lab session, participants could make online donations to charity for a total duration of three months. Our procedure justifying the exclusion of drop-outs consists in requiring participants to collect payments in person flexibly and as known in advance and as highlighted to them later. Our interpretation is that participants who failed to collect their positive payments under these circumstances are likely not to satisfy dominance. If we restrict the sample to subjects who did not drop out, but not otherwise, reminders significantly increase the overall amount of charitable giving. We also find that weekly reminders are no more effective than monthly reminders in increasing charitable giving, and that, in our three months duration experiment, standing orders do not increase giving relative to one-off donations

The impact of relative position and returns on sacrifice and reciprocity: an experimental study using individual decisions

We present a comprehensive experimental design that makes it possible to characterize other-regarding preferences and their relationship to the decision maker’s relative position. Participants are faced with a large number of decisions involving variations in the trade-offs between own and other’s payoffs, as well as in other potentially important factors like the decision maker’s relative position. We find that: (1) choices are responsive to the cost of helping and hurting others; (2) The weight a decision maker places on others’ monetary payoffs depends on whether the decision maker is in an advantageous or disadvantageous relative position; and (3) We find no evidence of reciprocity of the type linked to menu-dependence. The results of a mixture-model estimation show considerable heterogeneity in subjects’ motivations and confirm the absence of reciprocal motives. Pure selfish behavior is the most frequently observed behavior. Among the subjects exhibiting social preferences, social-welfare maximization is the most frequent, followed by inequality-aversion and by competitiveness

What happens if you single out? An experiment

We present an experiment investigating the effects of singling out an individual on trust and trustworthiness. We find that (a) trustworthiness falls if there is a singled out subject; (b) non-singled out subjects discriminate against the singled out subject when they are not responsible of the distinct status of this person; (c) under a negative frame, the singled out subject returns significantly less; (d) under a positive frame, the singled out subject behaves bimodally, either selecting very low or very high return rates. Overall, singling out induces a negligible effect on trust but is potentially disruptive for trustworthiness

Pathology of sea turtles <i>Caretta caretta</i> found on the coast of Apulia (south Italy)

On the basis of the most recent scientific literature, little is known on sea turtle renal pathology, as most published data mainly regard tortoises. The authors examined 49 carcasses of sea turtles belonging to the species Caretta caretta, stranded on the coasts of Apulia (South Italy). The subjects were classified by species and gender, weighed, morphometrical assessed, and submitted to pathological and bacteriological examinations

Heterogeneity in Preferences towards Complexity

We analyze lottery-choice data in a way that separately estimates the effects of risk aversion and complexity aversion. Complexity is represented by the number of different outcomes in the lottery. A finite mixture random effects model is estimated which assumes that a proportion of the population are complexity-neutral. We find that around 33% of the population are complexity-neutral, around 50% complexity-averse, and the remaining 17% are complexity-loving. Subjects who do react to complexity appear to have a bias towards complexity aversion at the start of the experiment, but complexity aversion reduces with experience, to the extent that the average subject is (almost) complexity-neutral by the end of the experiment. Complexity aversion is found to increase with age and to be higher for non-UK students than for UK students. We also find some evidence that, when evaluating complex lotteries, subjects perceive probabilities in accordance with Prospective Reference Theory

Comparative Analysis of Charging Station Technologies for Light Electric Vehicles for the Exploitation in Small Islands †

The worldwide growing adoption of Light Electric Vehicles (LEVs) indicates that such technology might in the near future be decisive for improving the sustainability of transportation. The segment of LEVs has some peculiar features compared to electric mobility in general, which then deserve a devoted investigation. Stakeholders are called to implement the most appropriate technology depending on the context, by taking into account multi-faceted factors, which are the investigation object of this work. At first, a methodology is formulated for estimating the power and energy impact of LEVs recharging. Based on this, and assessed that the load constituted by LEVs is in general modest but might create some problems in lowly structured networks, it becomes conceivable to develop Charging Station (CS) technologies which are alternative to the grid connection at a point of delivery. Yet, it is fundamental to develop accurate methodologies for the techno-economic and environmental analysis. This work considers a use case developed at the University of Brescia (Italy): a CS operating off-grid, powered by PhotoVoltaics (PV). Its peculiarity is that it is transportable, which makes it more appealing for rural/remote areas or when the charging demand is highly not homogeneous in time. On these grounds, this work specializes to a context where the proposed solution might be more appealing: small isolated islands, in particular Favignana in Sicily (Italy). It is estimated that the adoption of the proposed off-grid CS is by far advantageous as regards the greenhouse gases emissions but it is more economically profitable than the grid connection only if the number of users per day is less than order of 200. Hence this work provides meaningful indications on the usefulness of off-grid CS powered by PV in peculiar contexts and furnishes a general method for their techno-economic and environmental assessment

Strategy Learning in 3x3 Games by Neural Networks

This paper presents a neural network based methodology for examining the learning of game-playing rules in never-before seen games. A network is trained to pick Nash equilibria in a set of games and then released to play a larger set of new games. While faultlessly selecting Nash equilibria in never-before seen games is too complex a task for the network, Nash equilibria are chosen approximately 60% of the times. Furthermore, despite training the network to select Nash equilibria, what emerges are endogenously obtained bounded-rational rules which are closer to payoff dominance, and the best response to payoff dominance