ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SOUTHWESTERN MINNESOTA FARM MANAGEMENT SERVICE 1940

Farm Management,

Differential psychophysiologic reactivity and the Type A behavior pattern

Since 1975, many studies have attempted to show that Type As are sympathetically hyper-reactive to environmental stimuli compared to Type Bs. Inconsistencies in findings have led Holmes (1983} to 2 challenge the basic assumption that a link exists between the Type A behavior pattern and processes which precipitate development of coronary heart disease. The present.study was an attempt to isolate the organismic variable psycho-physiologic reactivity and demonstrate through a replication-extension of Holmes, McGilley, and Houston (1984} that individual psycho-physiologic reactivity rather than the personality profile of Type A is predictive of heightened arousal due to challenge. Reactive and nonreactive Type As and Type Bs were selected from a pool of 136 male undergraduates. All were exposed to increasingly difficult levels of the WAIS digits recall backwards and block design tasks, during which heart rate, blood pressure, and electrodermal response were measured. Results show reactives evinced significantly higher systolic blood pressure across challenges compared to nonreactives. Types As and Bs did not differ in their physiologic responses to challenges

We must protect competition. Policy Brief #2020/03 May 2020.

Germany's economic output slumped by 2.2 per-cent in the first quarter of this year, amounting to the sharpest drop since the financial crisis of 2008/2009. For the year as a whole, the federal government even expects the largest decline in gross domestic product since the post-war pe-riod. In its efforts to counteract the stark economic im-pact of the Corona pandemic, the federal govern-ment is putting in place aid programmes worth billions. Various packages are designed to se-cure the liquidity of companies with a functioning business model before the crisis. But the corpo-rate landscape will inevitably change. Many sec-tors such as tourism and the hospitality industry are massively affected by the lockdown and re-lated measures. Industries that are strongly inte-grated into international supply chains, such as the metal, electrical, and automotive industries, are also struggling with disruptions and losses. Despite the aid packages, there is a considera-ble risk of market upheaval. And on top, the packages themselves can come with negative ef-fects for competition, experts warn. Especially in heavily crisis-ridden sectors, there is a threat of reduced competition. Some companies will dis-appear from the market - ailing companies are good takeover candidates. All in all, an increase in market concentration is feared. And these developments have consequences for the competitiveness of the economy as a whole, as we show in our current study "Price Markups, Innovation, and Productivity: Evidence from Ger-many." We examine how competition between companies in Germany has developed in recent years and show that effective competition is an important driver of productivity and innovation. We summarize the key findings of the study in this policy brief

Spotlight Abstraction of Agents and Areas

We present "spotlight abstraction" as a generic abstraction technique for the analysis of systems comprising an unbounded number of communicating agents. The abstraction principle is heterogeneous in the sense that the behaviour of a finite number of agents is preserved while the others are only abstractly represented. The precision of the abstraction can be tuned by an iterative procedure based on the analysis of counterexamples. Going beyond existing work, we show how to use the spotlight principle for analysing systems where the physical position of agents is relevant. To this end, we put the spotlight on areas rather than on fixed sets of agents

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http://archive.org/details/reductioninmotor00tobeNAN