Structure and Power in Multilateral Negotiations: An Application to French Water Policy

Stakeholder negotiation is an increasingly important policymaking tool. However, relatively little is understood about the relationship between the structure of the negotiating process and the effectiveness with which stakeholders can pursue their individual interests. We apply the Rausser- Simon multilateral bargaining model to a specific negotiation process involving water storage capacity and use in the upper Adour Basin in southwestern France. We focus on a coalition of three stakeholder groups with aligned but distinct interests. In addition to the standard indices of bargaining powerԴhe distribution of political weights (ܡccessݩ and players٠utilities if an agreement is not reached, our analysis identifies other less obvious sources of power. First, a coalition member may benefit when his access is reduced if the redistribution increases the access of another coalition member who has a more favorable ܳtrategic location.ݠSecond, the interests of the coalition as a whole will usually, but not always, be advanced if its members cede access to a pokesmanݠrepresenting their common interests. However, some members may be adversely affected. Third, restricting the extent to which coalition members can make proposals that further their own individual interests at the expense of other coalition members will usually, but not always, harm the coalition as a whole.water, bargaining, negotiations, Environmental Economics and Policy, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Structure and bargaining power in multilateral negotiations : Application to water management policies in France

Environmental policies are characterized by a growing emphasis on participation, devolution and negotiated decision making. Increasingly, centralized top down decision making systems are being replaced by new forms of local governance. In their strongest versions, these involve delegation of formal authority to local stakeholders who are expected to decide collectively upon the management rules of local common-pool resources. Devolution is particularly important in relation to the allocation and management of scarce water resources. Indeed the French water law of 1992 institutionalised the notion of [...].

Time series prediction via aggregation : an oracle bound including numerical cost

We address the problem of forecasting a time series meeting the Causal Bernoulli Shift model, using a parametric set of predictors. The aggregation technique provides a predictor with well established and quite satisfying theoretical properties expressed by an oracle inequality for the prediction risk. The numerical computation of the aggregated predictor usually relies on a Markov chain Monte Carlo method whose convergence should be evaluated. In particular, it is crucial to bound the number of simulations needed to achieve a numerical precision of the same order as the prediction risk. In this direction we present a fairly general result which can be seen as an oracle inequality including the numerical cost of the predictor computation. The numerical cost appears by letting the oracle inequality depend on the number of simulations required in the Monte Carlo approximation. Some numerical experiments are then carried out to support our findings

Dynamic Simulation and Optimization for Arthrospira platensis Growth and C-Phycocyanin Production

This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.iecr.5b03102.C-phycocyanin is a high-value bioproduct synthesized from cyanobacterium Arthrospira platensis. To facilitate its application, advanced dynamic models were built to simulate the complex effects of light intensity, light attenuation and nitrate concentration on cell growth and pigment production in the current research. By comparing these models against the experimental results, their accuracy was verified in both batch and fed-batch processes. Three key findings are presented in this work. First, a noticeable difference between the optimal light intensity for cell growth (282 μmol m-2 s-1) and phycocyanin synthesis (137 μmol m-2 s-1) is identified. Second, light attenuation is demonstrated to be the primary factor causing the decrease of intracellular phycocyanin content instead of nitrate concentration in the fed-batch process, while it has no significant effect on total phycocyanin production. Finally, although high nitrate concentration can enhance cell growth, it is demonstrated to suppress intracellular phycocyanin accumulation in a long-term operation.Author E. A. del Rio-Chanona is funded by CONACyT scholarship No. 522530 and the Secretariat of Public Education and the Mexican government. This work was also supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program 863, China (No. 2014AA021701) and the National Marine Commonwealth Research Program, China (No. 201205020-2)

Redesigning a Street Corridor in San Clemente, CA: South El Camino Real Urban Design Concept Plan

The South El Camino Real Urban Design Concept Plan was developed by a first-year MCRP studio for the City of San Clemente, CA. The San Clemente community, the City planners and the City Council welcomed the students’ ideas for making the corridor appealing, economically attractive, and safer for pedestrians and bicyclists

Matrix stiffness modulates the activity of MMP-9 and TIMP-1 in hepatic stellate cells to perpetuate fibrosis

Liver fibrosis is characterised by a dense and highly cross-linked extracellular matrix (ECM) which promotes progression of diseases such as hepatocellular carcinoma. The fibrotic microenvironment is characterised by an increased stiffness, with rigidity associated with disease progression. External stiffness is known to promote hepatic stellate cell (HSC) activation through mechanotransduction, leading to increased secretion of ECM components. HSCs are key effector cells which maintain the composition of the ECM in health and disease, not only by regulating secretion of ECM proteins such as collagen, but also ECM-degrading enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and their inhibitors (TIMPs). Uninhibited MMPs degrade ECM proteins to reduce external rigidity. Using fibronectin-coated polyacrylamide gels to alter substrate rigidity without altering ligand density, we show that fibrotic rigidities downregulate MMP-9 expression and secretion, and also upregulate secretion of TIMP-1, though not its expression. Using tissue immunofluorescence studies, we also report that the expression of MMP-9 is significantly decreased in activated HSCs in fibrotic tissues associated with hepatocellular carcinoma. This suggests the presence of a mechanical network that allows HSCs to maintain a fibrotic ECM, with external rigidity providing feedback which affects MMP-9 and TIMP-1 secretion, which may become dysregulated in fibrosis

Impact of dedicated women’s outreach workers (WOWs) on recruitment of women in ACTG clinical studies

Background: Despite efforts by the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) to enroll representative numbers of diverse women, participation in ACTG studies in the United States remains largely white and male. To address this gap in women’s participation in ACTG research, a one-year pilot study of dedicated women’s outreach workers (WOWs) was proposed. Objectives: included demonstrating that targeted recruitment efforts can expand community awareness of ACTG research and ensuring successful enrollment of women at the respective clinical research sites. Methods: The pilot study was conducted at two U.S. sites (Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and Emory Ponce de Leon Center in Atlanta, Georgia). The WOWs worked with site personnel to identify and reach out to women living with HIV and/or Hepatitis B or C at their respective sites and encourage them to join a clinical trial registry for those interested in participating in future clinical trials. Results: The Rutgers WOW approached 127 potential participants (of whom 100 joined the WOW registry) and screened 35 participants for open ACTG studies. The Emory WOW approached 120 participants, enrolling 86 into the WOW registry, and screened 51 potential participants for open ACTG studies during the WOW’s tenure. The majority of women screened at both sites were women of color. Conclusions: The WOW study team identified several lessons learned that can inform future efforts to engage women living with HIV in clinical research. First, success in engaging women is proportional to level of funding and institutional support. Second, there is a need for a more gender-inclusive scientific agenda as women are more likely to participate if studies address topics of interest to them. Third, meaningful engagement is a two-way street

Concentration inequalities for random fields via coupling

We present a new and simple approach to concentration inequalities for functions around their expectation with respect to non-product measures, i.e., for dependent random variables. Our method is based on coupling ideas and does not use information inequalities. When one has a uniform control on the coupling, this leads to exponential concentration inequalities. When such a uniform control is no more possible, this leads to polynomial or stretched-exponential concentration inequalities. Our abstract results apply to Gibbs random fields, in particular to the low-temperature Ising model which is a concrete example of non-uniformity of the coupling.Comment: New corrected version; 22 pages; 1 figure; New result added: stretched-exponential inequalit

A stochastic cellular automaton model for traffic flow with multiple metastable states

A new stochastic cellular automaton (CA) model of traffic flow, which includes slow-to-start effects and a driver's perspective, is proposed by extending the Burgers CA and the Nagel-Schreckenberg CA model. The flow-density relation of this model shows multiple metastable branches near the transition density from free to congested traffic, which form a wide scattering area in the fundamental diagram. The stability of these branches and their velocity distributions are explicitly studied by numerical simulations.Comment: 11 pages, 20 figures, submitted for publicatio

The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy

Landauer's erasure principle exposes an intrinsic relation between thermodynamics and information theory: the erasure of information stored in a system, S, requires an amount of work proportional to the entropy of that system. This entropy, H(S|O), depends on the information that a given observer, O, has about S, and the work necessary to erase a system may therefore vary for different observers. Here, we consider a general setting where the information held by the observer may be quantum-mechanical, and show that an amount of work proportional to H(S|O) is still sufficient to erase S. Since the entropy H(S|O) can now become negative, erasing a system can result in a net gain of work (and a corresponding cooling of the environment).Comment: Added clarification on non-cyclic erasure and reversible computation (Appendix E). For a new version of all technical proofs see the Supplementary Information of the journal version (free access