An empirical analysis of strategic contracts

The conference program's website is located at http://editorialexpress.com/conference/ALEA2013/program/ALEA2013.htmlSession 3 (Panel IC): Contracts: Incentives and InnovationThis article investigates the use of strategic contract clauses such as most-favored-customer clauses, rights of first refusal, rights of first offer, first negotiation rights in bio-tech R&D contracts between pharmaceutical firms and bio-tech agents. It is shown that these strategic rights are more likely adopted when potential entry threat from other pharmaceutical firms are larger. This result is consistent with the prediction from the literature: strategic contracts can increase the joint benefit of contracting parties by extracting rent from entrants and/or protect investments by contracting parties. Furthermore, strategic rights and termination rights held by pharmaceutical firms are shown to be substitutes, and the level of substitution is affected by the uncertainty of the R&D activities involved and the previous relationship between contracting parties. These results can be explained by a multi-task theory where bio-tech agents allocate effort between R&D activities specified in contracts and non-contracted R&D activities.postprin

Transport critical current density in Fe-sheathed nano-SiC doped MgB2 wires

The nano-SiC doped MgB2/Fe wires were fabricated using a powder-in-tube method and an in-situ reaction process. The depression of Tc with increasing SiC doping level remained rather small due to the counterbalanced effect of Si and C co-doping. The high level SiC co-doping allowed creation of the intra-grain defects and nano-inclusions, which act as effective pinning centers, resulting in a substantial enhancement in the Jc(H) performance. The transport Jc for all the wires is comparable to the magnetic Jc at higher fields despite the low density of the samples and percolative nature of current. The transport Ic for the 10wt% SiC doped MgB2/Fe reached 660A at 5K and 4.5T (Jc = 133,000A/cm2) and 540A at 20K and 2T (Jc = 108,000A/cm2). The transport Jc for the 10wt% SiC doped MgB2 wire is more than an order of magnitude higher than for the state-the-art Fe-sheathed MgB2 wire reported to date at 5K and 10T and 20K and 5T respectively. There is a plenty of room for further improvement in Jc as the density of the current samples is only 50%.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures, presented at ASC 2002, Housto

Hidden itinerant-spin phase in heavily-overdoped La2-xSrxCuO4 revealed by dilute Fe doping: A combined neutron scattering and angle-resolved photoemission study

We demonstrated experimentally a direct way to probe a hidden propensity to the formation of spin density wave (SDW) in a non-magnetic metal with strong Fermi surface nesting. Substituting Fe for a tiny amount of Cu (1%) induced an incommensurate magnetic order below 20 K in heavily-overdoped La2-xSrxCuO4 (LSCO). Elastic neutron scattering suggested that this order cannot be ascribed to the localized spins on Cu or doped Fe. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), combined with numerical calculations, revealed a strong Fermi surface nesting inherent in the pristine LSCO that likely drives this order. The heavily-overdoped Fe-doped LSCO thus represents the first plausible example of the long-sought "itinerant-spin extreme" of cuprates, where the spins of itinerant doped holes define the magnetic ordering ground state. This finding complements the current picture of cuprate spin physics that highlights the predominant role of localized spins at lower dopings. The demonstrated set of methods could potentially apply to studying hidden density-wave instabilities of other "nested" materials on the verge of density wave ordering.Comment: Abstract and discussion revised; to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Bacterial isolates from patients with preterm labor with and without preterm rupture of the fetal membranes.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to describe the bacterial flora of women in preterm labor with or without premature rupture of membranes. METHODS: Retrospective studies of 239 patients with preterm labor were performed. RESULTS: One hundred and twenty-three of 239 patients with preterm labor (51.5%) had bacterial vaginosis. Seventy of the 239 patients with preterm labor (29.3%) developed premature rupture of the membranes (preterm PROM). Of the 70 patients with preterm PROM, 51 (72.9%) had bacterial vaginosis. Therefore, 51 of the 123 patients with bacterial vaginosis (41.5%) developed preterm PROM. An increased number of organisms detected from the vaginal discharge in patients with preterm labor was associated with preterm PROM by Cochran-Armitage test. An increased number of organisms detected from the vaginal discharge in patients with preterm labor complicated with bacterial vaginosis was significantly associated with preterm PROM by Cochran-Armitage test. CONCLUSIONS: In preterm labor, the number of different species detected in the vagina provide sensitive and specific prediction of preterm PROM in patients with preterm labor

Agency and strategic contracts: Theory and evidence from R&D agreements in the pharmaceutical industry

We examine the use of strategic rights in research and development (R&D) agreements between a client and an agent, when an entrant may compete with the client for the license of non-contracted discoveries developed by the agent. The agent puts effort either in the contracted project, or into other R&D activities which can result in non-contracted discoveries. Strategic rights help the client and the agent extract rent from the entrant, and also motivate the agent to place effort into the contracted project. Accordingly, firms are more likely to adopt strategic rights when the likelihood of entry is larger. Moreover, strategic rights and termination rights are substitutes in mitigating agency problems. By investigating R&D agreements between pharmaceutical clients and bio-tech agents, we find consistent evidence of the positive impact of entry threat on the use of strategic rights, as well as evidence of the substitution between strategic rights and termination rights

New Insights into Traffic Dynamics: A Weighted Probabilistic Cellular Automaton Model

From the macroscopic viewpoint for describing the acceleration behavior of drivers, this letter presents a weighted probabilistic cellular automaton model (the WP model, for short) by introducing a kind of random acceleration probabilistic distribution function. The fundamental diagrams, the spatio-temporal pattern are analyzed in detail. It is shown that the presented model leads to the results consistent with the empirical data rather well, nonlinear velocity-density relationship exists in lower density region, and a new kind of traffic phenomenon called neo-synchronized flow is resulted. Furthermore, we give the criterion for distinguishing the high-speed and low-speed neo-synchronized flows and clarify the mechanism of this kind of traffic phenomena. In addition, the result that the time evolution of distribution of headways is displayed as a normal distribution further validates the reasonability of the neo-synchronized flow. These findings suggest that the diversity and randomicity of drivers and vehicles has indeed remarkable effect on traffic dynamics.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Europhysics Letter

Fermion localization on asymmetric two-field thick branes

In this paper we investigate the localization of fermions on asymmetric thick branes generated by two scalars $\phi$ and $\chi$. In order to trap fermions on the asymmetric branes with kink-like warp factors, the couplings with the background scalars $\eta\bar{\Psi}F(\chi,\phi)\Psi$ are introduced, where $F(\chi,\phi)$ is a function of $\phi$ and $\chi$. We find that the coupling $\eta\bar{\Psi}\chi\phi\Psi$ do not support the localization of 4-dimensional fermions on the branes. While, for the case $\eta\bar{\Psi}\chi\Psi+\eta'\bar{\Psi}\phi\Psi$, which is the kink-fermion coupling corresponding to one-scalar-generated brane scenarios, the zero mode of left-handed fermions could be trapped on the branes under some conditions.Comment: v2: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted by CQ

Enabling Hyper-Personalisation: Automated Ad Creative Generation and Ranking for Fashion e-Commerce

Homepage is the first touch point in the customer's journey and is one of the prominent channels of revenue for many e-commerce companies. A user's attention is mostly captured by homepage banner images (also called Ads/Creatives). The set of banners shown and their design, influence the customer's interest and plays a key role in optimizing the click through rates of the banners. Presently, massive and repetitive effort is put in, to manually create aesthetically pleasing banner images. Due to the large amount of time and effort involved in this process, only a small set of banners are made live at any point. This reduces the number of banners created as well as the degree of personalization that can be achieved. This paper thus presents a method to generate creatives automatically on a large scale in a short duration. The availability of diverse banners generated helps in improving personalization as they can cater to the taste of larger audience. The focus of our paper is on generating wide variety of homepage banners that can be made as an input for user level personalization engine. Following are the main contributions of this paper: 1) We introduce and explain the need for large scale banner generation for e-commerce 2) We present on how we utilize existing deep learning based detectors which can automatically annotate the required objects/tags from the image. 3) We also propose a Genetic Algorithm based method to generate an optimal banner layout for the given image content, input components and other design constraints. 4) Further, to aid the process of picking the right set of banners, we designed a ranking method and evaluated multiple models. All our experiments have been performed on data from Myntra (http://www.myntra.com), one of the top fashion e-commerce players in India.Comment: Workshop on Recommender Systems in Fashion, 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 201