Beyond Brooke Group: Bringing Reality to the Law of Predatory Pricing

This Feature offers a roadmap for bringing and deciding predatory pricing cases under the Supreme Court’s restrictive Brooke Group decision. Brooke Group requires a plaintiff to show that the defendant set a price below cost and had a sufficient likelihood of recouping its investment in predation. This framework, which was adopted without any contested presentation of its merits, has endured despite its flaws. Beyond this framework, the Court opined in dicta that predation is implausible. We identify points of flexibility within the Court’s framework that permit an empirically grounded evaluation of the predation claim. Under the price-cost test, a plaintiff has leeway to select an appropriate measure of cost, including incremental cost. In considering recoupment, Brooke Group’s skeptical dicta should be confined to the particular market structure and theory of recoupment analyzed in that case. The dicta do not apply, for example, to a monopolist who recoups by earning a reputation for predation. A further reason to confine Brooke Group’s dicta is the Court’s highly unusual reweighing of the evidence presented at trial. As we explain using new historical research, this was not the Court’s initial plan after oral argument, but Justice Kennedy switched his vote. We also make the case against extending the price-cost test to more complex pricing strategies, such as loyalty discounts, in which the motivation for a stringent rule—to avoid costly false positives—has little purchase

B spectroscopy using all-to-all propagators

We measure the ground and excited states for B mesons in the static limit using maximally variance reduced estimators for light quark propagators. Because of the large number of propagators we are able to measure accurately also orbitally excited P, D and F states. We also present some results for Lambda_b.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Talk presented at Lattice '97 by J. Peis

Beyond Brooke Group: Bringing Reality to the Law of Predatory Pricing

This Feature offers a roadmap for bringing and deciding predatory pricing cases under the Supreme Court’s restrictive Brooke Group decision. Brooke Group requires a plaintiff to show that the defendant set a price below cost and had a sufficient likelihood of recouping its investment in predation. This framework, which was adopted without any contested presentation of its merits, has endured despite its flaws. Beyond this framework, the Court opined in dicta that predation is implausible. We identify points of flexibility within the Court’s framework that permit an empirically grounded evaluation of the predation claim. Under the price-cost test, a plaintiff has leeway to select an appropriate measure of cost, including incremental cost. In considering recoupment, Brooke Group’s skeptical dicta should be confined to the particular market structure and theory of recoupment analyzed in that case. The dicta do not apply, for example, to a monopolist who recoups by earning a reputation for predation. A further reason to confine Brooke Group’s dicta is the Court’s highly unusual reweighing of the evidence presented at trial. As we explain using new historical research, this was not the Court’s initial plan after oral argument, but Justice Kennedy switched his vote. We also make the case against extending the price-cost test to more complex pricing strategies, such as loyalty discounts, in which the motivation for a stringent rule—to avoid costly false positives—has little purchase

Research Notes : United States : Response of tolerant and susceptible soybean cultivars to Columbia lance nematode

Columbia lance nematode, CLN [Hoplolaimus columbus Sher], is a migratory endo-and ectoparasite of soybean and commonly causes yield reductions of up to 30% in tolerant cultivars. Complete crop failure may occur on moisture-stressed or susceptible cultivars. First recognized as a major parasite of cotton and soybean in 1967 (Fassultiotis et al., 1968), CLN now infests a large portion of the coastal plain of South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina. .pd

Is Food Insecurity Associated with HIV Risk? Cross-Sectional Evidence from Sexually Active Women in Brazil

Alexander Tsai and colleagues show that in sexually active women in Brazil severe food insecurity with hunger was positively associated with symptoms potentially indicative of sexually transmitted infection and with reduced odds of condom use

Multiple Parton Interactions, top--antitop and W+4j production at the LHC

The expected rate for Multiple Parton Interactions (MPI) at the LHC is large. This requires an estimate of their impact on all measurement foreseen at the LHC while opening unprecendented opportunities for a detailed study of these phenomena. In this paper we examine the MPI background to top-antitop production, in the semileptonic channel, in the early phase of data taking when the full power of $b$--tagging will not be available. The MPI background turns out to be small but non negligible, of the order of 20% of the background provided by W+4j production through a Single Parton Interaction. We then analyze the possibility of studying Multiple Parton Interactions in the W+4j channel, a far more complicated setting than the reactions examined at lower energies. The MPI contribution turns out to be dominated by final states with two energetic jets which balance in transverse momentum, and it appears possible, thanks to the good angular resolution of ATLAS and CMS, to separate the Multiple Parton Interactions contribution from Single Parton Interaction processes. The large cross section for two jet production suggests that also Triple Parton Interactions (TPI) could provide a non negligible contribution. Our preliminary analysis suggests that it might be indeed possible to investigate TPI at the LHC.Comment: Typos fixed. Published in JHE

LDA+Gutzwiller Method for Correlated Electron Systems

Combining the density functional theory (DFT) and the Gutzwiller variational approach, a LDA+Gutzwiller method is developed to treat the correlated electron systems from {\it ab-initio}. All variational parameters are self-consistently determined from total energy minimization. The method is computationally cheaper, yet the quasi-particle spectrum is well described through kinetic energy renormalization. It can be applied equally to the systems from weakly correlated metals to strongly correlated insulators. The calculated results for SrVO$_3$, Fe, Ni and NiO, show dramatic improvement over LDA and LDA+U.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

HIV/AIDS, Food Supplementation and Livelihood Programs in Uganda: A Way Forward?

BACKGROUND: Over the last decade, health, nutrition and policy experts have become increasingly aware of the many ways in which food insecurity and HIV infection negatively impact and reinforce one another. In response, many organizations providing HIV care began supplying food aid to clients in need. Food supplementation, however, was quickly recognized as an unsustainable and incomplete intervention. Many HIV care organizations therefore developed integrated HIV and livelihood programs (IHLPs) to target the root causes of food insecurity. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We conducted a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with 21 key informants who worked at seven organizations providing HIV care, food aid, or IHLPs in Kampala, Uganda in 2007-2008 to better understand the impact of IHLPs on the well-being of people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHAs) and the challenges in transitioning clients from food aid to IHLPs. There was strong consensus among those interviewed that IHLPs are an important intervention in addressing food insecurity and its adverse health consequences among PLWHAs. Key informants identified three main challenges in transitioning PLWHAs from food supplementation programs to IHLPs: (1) lack of resources (2) timing of the transition and (3) logistical considerations including geography and weather. Factors seen as contributing to the success of programs included: (1) close involvement of community leaders (2) close ties with local and national government (3) diversification of IHLP activities and (4) close integration with food supplementation programs, all linked through a central program of HIV care. CONCLUSION: Health, policy and development experts should continue to strengthen IHLPs for participants in need. Further research is needed to determine when and how participants should be transitioned from food supplementation to IHLPs, and to determine how to better correlate measures of food insecurity with objective clinical outcomes so as to better evaluate program results

Maximal variance reduction for stochastic propagators with applications to the static quark spectrum

We study a new method -- maximal variance reduction -- for reducing the variance of stochastic estimators for quark propagators. We find that while this method is comparable to usual iterative inversion for light-light mesons, a considerable improvement is achieved for systems containing at least one infinitely heavy quark. Such systems are needed for heavy quark effective theory. As an illustration of the effectiveness of the method we present results for the masses of the ground state and excited states of $\bar{Q}q$ mesons and $\bar{Q}qq$ baryons. We compare these results with the experimental spectra involving $b$ quarks.Comment: 31 pages with 7 postscript file