Are Groups more Rational than Individuals? A Review of Interactive Decision Making in Groups

Many decisions are interactive; the outcome of one party depends not only on its decisions or on acts of nature but also on the decisions of others. In the present article, we review the literature on decision making made by groups of the past 25 years. Researchers have compared the strategic behavior of groups and individuals in many games: prisoner’s dilemma, dictator, ultimatum, trust, centipede and principal-agent games, among others. Our review suggests that results are quite consistent in revealing that groups behave closer to the game-theoretical assumption of rationality and selfishness than individuals. We conclude by discussing future research avenues in this area.group decision making, interactive decision making, rationality, discontinuity effect

Venus cusp observations during 1969 - Synopsis of results

Venus cusp observations during 196

Unleashing Animal Spirits - Self-Control and Overpricing in Experimental Asset Markets

One possible determinant of overpricing on asset markets is a lack of self-control abilities of traders. Self-control is the individual capacity to override or inhibit undesired behavioral tendencies such as impulses and to refrain from acting on them. We implement the first experiment that is able to address a potential causal relationship between self-control abilities and systematic overpricing on financial markets by introducing an exogenous variation of self-control abilities. Our experimental conditions seek to detect some of the channels through which individual self-control problems could transmit into irrational exuberance on the aggregate level. We observe a strong effect of inhibited self-control abilities on market overpricing. Our findings are furthermore robust to reducing self-control abilities only for a moderate share of traders in a market. Low self-control traders engage in more speculative behavior early on, but because others imitate their trading patterns, they do not end up earning less and are not driven out of the market

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

Monitoring and Pay: An Experiment on Employee Performance under Endogenous Supervision

We present an experimental test of a shirking model where monitoring intensity is endogenous and effort a continuous variable. Wage level, monitoring intensity and consequently the desired enforceable effort level are jointly determined by the maximization problem of the firm. As a result, monitoring and pay should be complements. In our experiment, between and within treatment variation is qualitatively in line with the normative predictions of the model under standard assumptions. Yet, we also find evidence for reciprocal behavior. Our data analysis shows, however, that it does not pay for the employer to solely rely on the reciprocity of employees

Centrosome amplification mediates small extracellular vesicles secretion via lysosome disruption

PreprintSummary Bidirectional communication between cells and their surrounding environment is critical in both normal and pathological settings. Extracellular vesicles (EVs), which facilitate the horizontal transfer of molecules between cells, are recognized as an important constituent of cell-cell communication. In cancer, alterations in EV secretion contribute to the growth and metastasis of tumor cells. However, the mechanisms underlying these changes remain largely unknown. Here, we show that centrosome amplification is associated with and sufficient to promote small extracellular vesicle ( S EV) secretion in pancreatic cancer cells. This is a direct result due of lysosomal dysfunction, caused by increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) downstream of extra centrosomes. Defects in lysosome function promotes multivesicular body fusion with the plasma membrane, thereby enhancing S EV secretion. Furthermore, we find that S EVs secreted in response to amplified centrosomes are functionally distinct and activate pancreatic stellate cells (PSCs). These activated PSCs promote the invasion of pancreatic cancer cells in heterotypic 3-D cultures. We propose that S EVs secreted by cancer cells with amplified centrosomes influence the bidirectional communication between the tumor cells and the surrounding stroma to promote malignancy

NY-ESO-1 tumour associated antigen is a cytoplasmic protein detectable by specific monoclonal antibodies in cell lines and clinical specimens

NY-ESO-1 gene encodes a novel member of the cancer/testis (CT) family of human tumour-associated antigens (TAA). Specific monoclonal antibodies (mAb) have identified the corresponding gene product in lysates of tumour cell lines as a 22 kDa protein but no data are available concerning its intracellular location or distribution within neoplastic tissues. We have generated NY-ESO-1 specific mAbs recognizing the target molecule in cytospin preparations and in sections from clinical tumour specimens. These reagents identify NY-ESO-1 TAA in melanoma cell lines expressing the specific gene as a cytoplasmic protein, sharing the intracellular location of most MAGE TAA. In a series of 12 melanoma specimens, specific staining, limited to neoplastic cells, was detectable in the five cases where NY-ESO-1 gene expression was observed. In two of them over 90% of tumour cells showed evidence of positive staining. Lower percentages of positive neoplastic cells ranging between single cells and 50% were observed in the remaining tumours. These data suggest that active specific immunotherapies targeting NY-ESO-1, alone or in combination with other TAA could be of high clinical relevance in sizeable subgroups of melanoma patients. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaig

On the automatic construction of indistinguishable operations

An increasingly important design constraint for software running on ubiquitous computing devices is security, particularly against physical methods such as side-channel attack. One well studied methodology for defending against such attacks is the concept of indistinguishable functions which leak no information about program control flow since all execution paths are computationally identical. However, constructing such functions by hand becomes laborious and error prone as their complexity increases. We investigate techniques for automating this process and find that effective solutions can be constructed with only minor amounts of computational effort.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - SFRH/BPD/20528/2004

O-Verbrückte Angucyclinone, Verfahren zu ihrer Herstellung, sie enthaltende Arzneimittel und deren Verwendung

Es werden das verbrückte Angucyclinon Gephyromycin (1a) und Derivate dieser Verbindung nach der allgemeinen Formel 1 beschrieben sowie ein Verfahren zu ihrer Herstellung. Diese Substanzen erhöhen die intrazelluläre Calciumkonzentration in Neuronen. Weiterhin besitzen sie eine antibiotische Wirkung gegenüber Gram-positiven Bakterien

The OPERA experiment Target Tracker

The main task of the Target Tracker detector of the long baseline neutrino oscillation OPERA experiment is to locate in which of the target elementary constituents, the lead/emulsion bricks, the neutrino interactions have occurred and also to give calorimetric information about each event. The technology used consists in walls of two planes of plastic scintillator strips, one per transverse direction. Wavelength shifting fibres collect the light signal emitted by the scintillator strips and guide it to both ends where it is read by multi-anode photomultiplier tubes. All the elements used in the construction of this detector and its main characteristics are described.Comment: 25 pages, submitted to Nuclear Instrument and Method