33 research outputs found
Welfare Standards and Merger Analysis: Why not the Best?
Over the past several decades, there has emerged a rough consensus among professional antitrust practitioners, and within the law and economics community generally, that the "competition" referred to in our antitrust statutes is not to be interpreted simply as pre-merger rivalry among entities. Rather, it is best viewed as a process, the outcome of which is welfare, with welfare-not "rivalry"--being the object of interest. Consistent with this interpretation, scholars, competition authorities, and the courts have come to treat antitrust law as condemning only those mergers whose effect may be substantially to reduce welfare. That having been said, there remains a question of which welfare standard to use, and exactly whose welfare to consider. Several candidates suggest themselves. I argue in this paper for using the so-called "Total Welfare" standard, rather than the more commonly employed "Consumer Welfare" standard. In doing so, I respond to three broad objections that have been raised. One is that use of a total welfare standard conflicts with antitrust law, or at least with legal precedent. A second is that employing a total welfare standard would be more costly for antitrust agencies than employing one or another flavor of a consumer welfare standard. A third is that the total welfare standard ignores important distributional considerations-considerations that are better treated under some form of consumer welfare standard. Each of these objections is evaluated, and ultimately found unpersuasive.
Statements of Agreement From the Targeted Evaluation and Active Management (TEAM) Approaches to Treating Concussion Meeting Held in Pittsburgh, October 15-16, 2015
Conventional management for concussion involves prescribed rest and progressive return to activity. Recent evidence challenges this notion and suggests that active approaches may be effective for some patients. Previous concussion consensus statements provide limited guidance regarding active treatment
Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter–Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set
The transition from hunting and gathering to farming involved a major cultural innovation that has spread rapidly over most of the globe in the last ten millennia. In sub-Saharan Africa, hunter–gatherers have begun to shift toward an agriculture-based lifestyle over the last 5,000 years. Only a few populations still base their mode of subsistence on hunting and gathering. The Pygmies are considered to be the largest group of mobile hunter–gatherers of Africa. They dwell in equatorial rainforests and are characterized by their short mean stature. However, little is known about the chronology of the demographic events—size changes, population splits, and gene flow—ultimately giving rise to contemporary Pygmy (Western and Eastern) groups and neighboring agricultural populations. We studied the branching history of Pygmy hunter–gatherers and agricultural populations from Africa and estimated separation times and gene flow between these populations. We resequenced 24 independent noncoding regions across the genome, corresponding to a total of ∼33 kb per individual, in 236 samples from seven Pygmy and five agricultural populations dispersed over the African continent. We used simulation-based inference to identify the historical model best fitting our data. The model identified included the early divergence of the ancestors of Pygmy hunter–gatherers and farming populations ∼60,000 years ago, followed by a split of the Pygmies' ancestors into the Western and Eastern Pygmy groups ∼20,000 years ago. Our findings increase knowledge of the history of the peopling of the African continent in a region lacking archaeological data. An appreciation of the demographic and adaptive history of African populations with different modes of subsistence should improve our understanding of the influence of human lifestyles on genome diversity
Evolutionary insights into the high worldwide prevalence of MBL2 deficiency alleles
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