Antitrust, Innovation, and Uncertain Property Rights: Some Practical Considerations

The intersection of antitrust and intellectual property circumscribes two century-long debates. The first pertains to questions about how antitrust law and intellectual property law interact, and the second pertains to questions about how parties can exploit property rights, including intellectual property rights, to exclude competitors. This iBrief finesses these questions and turns to practical considerations about how innovation and intellectual property can impinge antitrust enforcement. This iBrief develops two propositions. First, although collaborative research and development has often been and remains unwittingly misunderstood, what is understood about it is consistent with the long- standing observation that antitrust has rarely interfered with collaborative ventures. Second, shifting focus from “intellectual property rights” to “uncertain property rights” makes it easier to understand what innovation and intellectual property imply for enforcement processes. Both intellectual property and tangible assets imply the same processes, but the boundaries of intellectual properties may be uncertain and may, in turn, allow parties to game enforcement processes in ways that would not be feasible in antitrust matters that principally feature tangible assets. Even so, uncertain property rights might not frustrate enforcement processes as the antitrust authorities may yet be able to factor parties’ strategic behaviors into the design of antitrust remedies

Organization, Control and the Single Entity Defense in Antitrust

Since at least the 1930's economists have puzzled over how to delineate the boundaries of the firm. With the advent of antitrust legislation in 1890, courts have been pressed to consider what constitute conspiracies between corporate entities to restrain commerce. By the 1940's, courts started to characterize conspiracies by sorting out what they are not — specifically, by extending the status of "single entity" to certain types of business arrangements. Both efforts in economics and in the law to sort out what constitutes a "firm" or "single entity" have focused on "control." A difficulty is that neither the law nor economics offer an operationally significant concept of control. Even so, both law and economics contribute concepts other than control that provide a way of understanding economic organization. These concepts — control rights, adaptation, delegation, and renegotiation — suggests how one can subsume the sometimes confusing array of single entity tests proposed in the case law within a two-stage sequence of tests.

Spectral convexity for attractive SU(2N) fermions

We prove a general theorem on spectral convexity with respect to particle number for 2N degenerate components of fermions. The number of spatial dimensions is arbitrary, and the system may be uniform or constrained by an external potential. We assume only that the interactions are governed by an SU(2N)-invariant two-body potential whose Fourier transform is negative definite. The convexity result implies that the ground state is in a 2N-particle clustering phase. We discuss implications for light nuclei as well as asymmetric nuclear matter in neutron stars.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures; references adde

The Contribution and Potential of Data Harmonization for Cross-National Comparative Research

The promise of empirical evidence to inform policy makers about their population's health, wealth, employment and economic well being has propelled governments to invest in the harmonization of country specific micro data over the last 25 years. We review the major data harmonization projects launched over this period. These projects include the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF), the Consortium of Household Panels for European Socio-Economic Research (CHER), the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), and the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We discuss their success in providing reliable data for policy analysis and how they are being used to answer policy questions. While there have been some notable failures, on the whole these harmonization efforts have proven to be of major value to the research community and to policy makers.

A comparative analysis of graphical interaction and logistic regression modelling: self-care and coping with a chronic illness in later life

Quantitative research especially in the social, but also in the biological sciences has been limited by the availability and applicability of analytic techniques that elaborate interactions among behaviours, treatment effects, and mediating variables. This gap has been filled by a newly developed statistical technique, known as graphical interaction modelling. The merit of graphical models for analyzing highly structured data is explored in this paper by an empirical study on coping with a chronic condition as a function of interrelationships between three sets of factors. These include background factors, illness context factors and four self--care practices. Based on a graphical chain model, the direct and indirect dependencies are revealed and discussed in comparison to the results obtained from a simple logistic regression model ignoring possible interaction effects. Both techniques are introduced from a more tutorial point of view instead of going far into technical details

Renormalization of Drift and Diffusivity in Random Gradient Flows

We investigate the relationship between the effective diffusivity and effective drift of a particle moving in a random medium. The velocity of the particle combines a white noise diffusion process with a local drift term that depends linearly on the gradient of a gaussian random field with homogeneous statistics. The theoretical analysis is confirmed by numerical simulation. For the purely isotropic case the simulation, which measures the effective drift directly in a constant gradient background field, confirms the result previously obtained theoretically, that the effective diffusivity and effective drift are renormalized by the same factor from their local values. For this isotropic case we provide an intuitive explanation, based on a {\it spatial} average of local drift, for the renormalization of the effective drift parameter relative to its local value. We also investigate situations in which the isotropy is broken by the tensorial relationship of the local drift to the gradient of the random field. We find that the numerical simulation confirms a relatively simple renormalization group calculation for the effective diffusivity and drift tensors.Comment: Latex 16 pages, 5 figures ep

Association of prior depressive symptoms and suicide attempts with subsequent victimisation - analysis of population-based data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey

Background: Symptoms of mental disorder, particularly schizophrenia, predispose to victimisation. Much less is known about the relationship between depressive symptoms and later victimisation in the general population, the influence of these symptoms on types of subsequent victimisation, or the role of symptom severity. We investigated this in nationally representative data from the UK. Methods: Data were from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2007. Multivariable logistic regressions estimated association between: a. prior depressive symptoms, and b. prior depressive symptoms with suicide attempt, and types of more recent victimisation. Gender-specific associations were estimated using multiplicative interactions. Results: Prior depressive symptoms were associated with greater odds of any recent intimate partner violence (IPV), emotional IPV, sexual victimisation, workplace victimisation, any victimisation, and cumulative victimisation (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) for increasing types of recent victimisation: 1.47, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.14, 1.89). Prior depressive symptoms with suicide attempt were associated with any recent IPV, emotional IPV, any victimisation, and cumulative victimisation (aOR for increasing types of recent victimisation: 2.33, 95%: 1.22, 4.44). Limitations: Self-reported recalled data on previous depressive symptoms, may have limited accuracy. Small numbers of outcomes for some comparisons resulted in imprecision of these estimates. Conclusion: Aside from severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, previous depressive symptoms in the general population are associated with greater subsequent victimisation. Men and women with prior depressive symptoms may be vulnerable to a range of types of victimisation, and may benefit from interventions to reduce this vulnerability

Topical Menthol, Ice, Peripheral Blood Flow, and Perceived Discomfort

Context : Injury management commonly includes decreasing arterial blood flow to the affected site in an attempt to reduce microvascular blood flow and edema and limit the induction of inflammation. Applied separately, ice and menthol gel decrease arterial blood flow, but the combined effects of ice and menthol gel on arterial blood flow are unknown. Objectives : To compare radial artery blood flow, arterial diameter, and perceived discomfort before and after the application of 1 of 4 treatment conditions. Design : Experimental crossover design. Setting : Clinical laboratory. Participants or Other Participants : Ten healthy men, 9 healthy women (mean age = 25.68 years, mean height = 1.73 m, mean weight = 76.73 kg). Intervention(s) : Four treatment conditions were randomly applied for 20 minutes to the right forearm of participants on 4 different days separated by at least 24 hours: (1) 3.5 mL menthol gel, (2) 0.5 kg of crushed ice, (3) 3.5 mL of menthol gel and 0.5 kg of crushed ice, or (4) no treatment (control). Main Outcome Measure(s) : Using high-resolution ultrasound, we measured right radial artery diameter (cm) and blood flow (mL/min) every 5 minutes for 20 minutes after the treatment was applied. Discomfort with the treatment was documented using a 1-to-10 intensity scale. Results : Radial artery blood flow decreased (P \u3c .05) from baseline in the ice (−20% to −24%), menthol (−17% to −24%), and ice and menthol (−36% to −39%) treatments but not in the control (3% to 9%) at 5, 10, and 15 minutes. At 20 minutes after baseline, only the ice (−27%) and combined ice and menthol (−38%) treatments exhibited reductions in blood flow (P \u3c .05). Discomfort was less with menthol than with the ice treatment at 5, 10, and 20 minutes after application (P \u3c .05). Arterial diameter and heart rate did not change. Conclusions : The application of 3.5 mL of menthol was similar to the application of 0.5 kg of crushed ice in reducing peripheral blood flood. Combining crushed ice with menthol appeared to have an additive effect on reducing blood flow

Temperature-dependent errors in nuclear lattice simulations

We study the temperature dependence of discretization errors in nuclear lattice simulations. We find that for systems with strong attractive interactions the predominant error arises from the breaking of Galilean invariance. We propose a local "well-tempered" lattice action which eliminates much of this error. The well-tempered action can be readily implemented in lattice simulations for nuclear systems as well as cold atomic Fermi systems.Comment: 33 pages, 17 figure