Partner selection supports reputation-based cooperation in a Public Goods Game

In dyadic models of indirect reciprocity, the receivers' history of giving has a significant impact on the donor's decision. When the interaction involves more than two agents things become more complicated, and in large groups cooperation can hardly emerge. In this work we use a Public Goods Game to investigate whether publicly available reputation scores may support the evolution of cooperation and whether this is affected by the kind of network structure adopted. Moreover, if agents interact on a bipartite graph with partner selection cooperation can thrive in large groups and in a small amount of time.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures. In press for Springer E

The fast response of academic spinoffs to unexpected societal and economic challenges. Lessons from the COVID‐19 pandemic crisis

The rapid emergence of the COVID‐19 crisis has challenged both private and public firms, requiring them to reshape their internal processes and external linkages in the fight against the virus, but also to survive the disrupting economic impact of the pandemic on their activities. Academic spinoffs have not been exempted from these dynamics. In this paper, we present and discuss a case study of an academic spinoff, Omnidermal, which has developed a new, efficient and easy‐to‐realize emergency life support machine for use in intensive and sub‐intensive care units. This case, apart from offering information on the best practices of how spinoffs may contribute socially to the fight against COVID‐19 and – more in general – against other exogenous shocks, also provides insights on their stages of development, evolution patterns and ability to define new solutions. The case shows that when the market needs are clear to a firm (as in the case of medical devices during the COVID‐19 crisis), the ‘legacy competences and practices’ of spinoffs (i.e., technical competences and work practices) can be fully exploited to compress the development time and to realize products demanded by the market. We also identify access to a network as being an essential boundary condition for this process. These results introduce an alternative scope for academic spinoffs. Given the ‘legacy competences and practices’ they are able to develop, they are ideal candidates to respond to the societal and economic challenges posed by a crisis over short periods of time. On the basis of these insights, we draw a series of implications for practitioners, policy makers and academics

Partner selection supported by opaque reputation promotes cooperative behavior

Reputation plays a major role in human societies, and it has been proposed as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation. While the majority of previous studies equates reputation with a transparent and complete history of players' past decisions, in real life, reputations are often ambiguous and opaque. Using web-based experiments, we explore the extent to which opaque reputation works in isolating defectors, with and without partner selection opportunities. Our results show that low reputation works as a signal of untrustworthiness, whereas medium or high reputation are not taken into account by participants for orienting their choices. We also find that reputation without partner selection does not promote cooperative behavior; that is, defectors do not turn into cooperators only for the sake of getting a positive reputation. Finally, in a third study, we find that, when reputation is pivotal to selection, then a substantial proportion of would-be defectors turn into cooperators. Taken together, these results provide insights on the characteristics of reputation and on the way in which humans make use of it when selecting partners but also when knowing that they will be selected

Entrepreneurship Education: the impact of different teaching models on the development of new ventures

The creation of innovative businesses (startups and spinoffs) is a phenomenon capable of stimulating the economy. The literature finds that entrepreneurship education (EE) impacts entrepreneurial intention. The aim of this research is to enter the black box of entrepreneurship teaching models in order to uncover their different impact on the creation of university entrepreneurial outcome. University entrepreneurial outcome is measured by the number of spinoffs created by 80 US universities in the Association of University Technology (AUTM) database from 2011 to 2014. This research, through analyses of 1,262 entrepreneurship courses in US universities along a time span of 4 years, shows that demand models and the competence models have a positive impact on the creation of academic spinoffs. Implications for professors teaching entrepreneurship, universities, policy makers and students are discussed

High CTLA-4 expression correlates with poor prognosis in thymoma patients

Thymomas, tumors that arise from epithelial cells of the thymus gland, are the most common neoplasms of the anterior mediastinum, with an incidence rate of approximately 2.5 per million/year. Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte Antigen 4 (CTLA-4 or CD152) exerts inhibitory activity on T cells, and since its oncogenic role in the progression of different types of tumors, it has emerged as a potential therapeutic target in cancer patients. In this study, we assessed the expression of CTLA-4 both at mRNA and protein levels in paraffin embedded-tissues from patients with thymomas. Furthermore, we evaluated the relationship between CTLA-4 expression and the clinical-pathologic characteristics and prognosis in patients with thymomas. Sixty-eight patients with median age corresponding to 62 years were included in this analysis. Thymomas were classified accordingly to the WHO and Masaoka-Koga for histochemical analysis and for prognostic significance. A statistical difference was found between CTLA-4 mRNA levels in human normal thymus compared with thymoma specimens. CTLA-4 expression was statistically found to progressively increase in A, B1, B2, AB and it was maximal in B3 thymomas. According to Masaoka-Koga pathological classification, CTLA-4 expression was lower in I, IIA and IIB, and higher in invasive III and IV stages. By confocal microscopy analysis we identified the expression of CTLA-4 both in tumor cells and in CD45+ tumor-infiltrating leukocytes, mainly in B3 and AB thymomas. Finally, CTLA-4 overexpression significantly correlates with reduced overall survival in thymoma patients and in atypical thymoma subgroup, suggesting that it represents a negative prognostic factor