Being Independent is a Great Thing: Subjective Evaluations of Self-Employment and Hierarchy

One can be independent, or subject to decisions made by others. This paper empirically tests whether individuals attach an intrinsic value to the institutional difference between independence and hierarchy. Taking self-employment as an important case of independence, it is shown that the self-employed derive more utility from their work than people employed by an organization, irrespective of income gained or hours worked. This is evidence for procedural utility: people do not only value outcomes, but also the conditions and processes leading to these outcomes.procedural utility, institutions, hierarchiy, self-employment, job satisfaction

MAC Resolvability: First And Second Order Results

Building upon previous work on the relation between secrecy and channel resolvability, we revisit a secrecy proof for the multiple-access channel from the perspective of resolvability. We then refine the approach in order to obtain some novel results on the second-order achievable rates.Comment: Slightly extended version of the paper accepted at the 4th Workshop on Physical-Layer Methods for Wireless Security during IEEE CNS 2017. v2: Fixed typos and extended literature section in accordance with reviewers' recommendation

Cooperative effects enhance the transport properties of molecular spider teams

Molecular spiders are synthetic molecular motors based on DNA nanotechnology. While natural molecular motors have evolved towards very high efficiency, it remains a major challenge to develop efficient designs for man-made molecular motors. Inspired by biological motor proteins such as kinesin and myosin, molecular spiders comprise a body and several legs. The legs walk on a lattice that is coated with substrate which can be cleaved catalytically. We propose a molecular spider design in which n spiders form a team. Our theoretical considerations show that coupling several spiders together alters the dynamics of the resulting team significantly. Although spiders operate at a scale where diffusion is dominant, spider teams can be tuned to behave nearly ballistic, which results in fast and predictable motion. Based on the separation of time scales of substrate and product dwell times, we develop a theory which utilizes equivalence classes to coarse-grain the microstate space. In addition, we calculate diffusion coefficients of the spider teams, employing a mapping of an n-spider team to an n-dimensional random walker on a confined lattice. We validate these results with Monte Carlo simulations and predict optimal parameters of the molecular spider team architecture which makes their motion most directed and maximally predictable

Resolvability on Continuous Alphabets

We characterize the resolvability region for a large class of point-to-point channels with continuous alphabets. In our direct result, we prove not only the existence of good resolvability codebooks, but adapt an approach based on the Chernoff-Hoeffding bound to the continuous case showing that the probability of drawing an unsuitable codebook is doubly exponentially small. For the converse part, we show that our previous elementary result carries over to the continuous case easily under some mild continuity assumption.Comment: v2: Corrected inaccuracies in proof of direct part. Statement of Theorem 3 slightly adapted; other results unchanged v3: Extended version of camera ready version submitted to ISIT 201