A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rankorder tournaments. This survey provides a review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the contest success function, number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review research on sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, and contests between groups, as well as real-effort and field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests to the study of legal systems, political competition, war, conflict avoidance, sales, and charities, and suggest directions for future research. (author's abstract

Exploring an immune function for murine SARM

THESIS 9807Innate immune cells, such as tissue-residing macrophages and dendritic cells (DCs) play a key role in initiating an immune response following the detection of invading pathogens via germline-encoded pattern-recognition receptors (PRRs) present on the cell surface or in intracellular compartments and the cytosol. PRRs selectively recognise conserved molecular features of the microbe and subsequently initiate distinct signalling cascades leading to transcription factor activation and the induction of proinflammatory cytokines (e.g. TNF-a), chemokines (e.g. CCL5/RANTES) and type I interferons (i.e. IFNa and IFN-?). One major family of PRRs are the membrane-bound Toll-like receptors (TLRs), which signal via the Toll/IL-1 receptor (TIR) domain-containing adaptor proteins IVIyD88, MAL, TRIP and TRAM. The immunological function of the fifth most evolutionarily conserved TIR adaptor sterile alpha and HEAT/Armadillo motif protein (SARM) is still enigmatic