Analytically Tractable Models for Decision Making under Present Bias

Time-inconsistency is a characteristic of human behavior in which people plan for long-term benefits but take actions that differ from the plan due to conflicts with short-term benefits. Such time-inconsistent behavior is believed to be caused by present bias, a tendency to overestimate immediate rewards and underestimate future rewards. It is essential in behavioral economics to investigate the relationship between present bias and time-inconsistency. In this paper, we propose a model for analyzing agent behavior with present bias in tasks to make progress toward a goal over a specific period. Unlike previous models, the state sequence of the agent can be described analytically in our model. Based on this property, we analyze three crucial problems related to agents under present bias: task abandonment, optimal goal setting, and optimal reward scheduling. Extensive analysis reveals how present bias affects the condition under which task abandonment occurs and optimal intervention strategies. Our findings are meaningful for preventing task abandonment and intervening through incentives in the real world

Optimal Transport with Cyclic Symmetry

We propose novel fast algorithms for optimal transport (OT) utilizing a cyclic symmetry structure of input data. Such OT with cyclic symmetry appears universally in various real-world examples: image processing, urban planning, and graph processing. Our main idea is to reduce OT to a small optimization problem that has significantly fewer variables by utilizing cyclic symmetry and various optimization techniques. On the basis of this reduction, our algorithms solve the small optimization problem instead of the original OT. As a result, our algorithms obtain the optimal solution and the objective function value of the original OT faster than solving the original OT directly. In this paper, our focus is on two crucial OT formulations: the linear programming OT (LOT) and the strongly convex-regularized OT, which includes the well-known entropy-regularized OT (EROT). Experiments show the effectiveness of our algorithms for LOT and EROT in synthetic/real-world data that has a strict/approximate cyclic symmetry structure. Through theoretical and experimental results, this paper successfully introduces the concept of symmetry into the OT research field for the first time

Biological mechanism and clinical effect of protein-bound polysaccharide K (KRESTIN®): review of development and future perspectives

The mechanism of action of protein-bound polysaccharide K (PSK; KRESTIN®) involves the following actions: (1) recovery from immunosuppression induced by humoral factors such as transforming growth factor (TGF)-β or as a result of surgery and chemotherapy; (2) activation of antitumor immune responses including maturation of dendritic cells, correction of Th1/Th2 imbalance, and promotion of interleukin-15 production by monocytes; and (3) enhancement of the antitumor effect of chemotherapy by induction of apoptosis and inhibition of metastasis through direct actions on tumor cells. The clinical effectiveness of PSK has been demonstrated for various cancers. In patients with gastric or colorectal cancer, combined use of PSK with postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy prolongs survival, and this effect has been confirmed in multiple meta-analyses. For small-cell lung carcinoma, PSK in conjunction with chemotherapy prolongs the remission period. In addition, PSK has been shown to be effective against various other cancers, reduce the adverse effects of chemotherapy, and improve quality of life. Future studies should examine the effects of PSK under different host immune conditions and tumor properties, elucidate the mechanism of action exhibited in each situation, and identify biomarkers

An Improved Approximation Algorithm for Wage Determination and Online Task Allocation in Crowd-Sourcing

Crowd-sourcing has attracted much attention due to its growing importance to society, and numerous studies have been conducted on task allocation and wage determination. Recent works have focused on optimizing task allocation and workers' wages, simultaneously. However, existing methods do not provide good solutions for real-world crowd-sourcing platforms due to the low approximation ratio or myopic problem settings. We tackle an optimization problem for wage determination and online task allocation in crowd-sourcing and propose a fast 1-1/(k+3)^(1/2)-approximation algorithm, where k is the minimum of tasks' budgets (numbers of possible assignments). This approximation ratio is greater than or equal to the existing method. The proposed method reduces the tackled problem to a non-convex multi-period continuous optimization problem by approximating the objective function. Then, the method transforms the reduced problem into a minimum convex cost flow problem, which is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem, and solves it by the capacity scaling algorithm. Synthetic experiments and simulation experiments using real crowd-sourcing data show that the proposed method solves the problem faster and outputs higher objective values than existing methods

Horizontal Chromosome Transfer, a Mechanism for the Evolution and Differentiation of a Plant-Pathogenic Fungus▿ †

The tomato pathotype of Alternaria alternata produces host-specific AAL toxin and causes Alternaria stem canker on tomato. A polyketide synthetase (PKS) gene, ALT1, which is involved in AAL toxin biosynthesis, resides on a 1.0-Mb conditionally dispensable chromosome (CDC) found only in the pathogenic and AAL toxin-producing strains. Genomic sequences of ALT1 and another PKS gene, both of which reside on the CDC in the tomato pathotype strains, were compared to those of tomato pathotype strains collected worldwide. This revealed that the sequences of both CDC genes were identical among five A. alternata tomato pathotype strains having different geographical origins. On the other hand, the sequences of other genes located on chromosomes other than the CDC are not identical in each strain, indicating that the origin of the CDC might be different from that of other chromosomes in the tomato pathotype. Telomere fingerprinting and restriction fragment length polymorphism analyses of the A. alternata strains also indicated that the CDCs in the tomato pathotype strains were identical, although the genetic backgrounds of the strains differed. A hybrid strain between two different pathotypes was shown to harbor the CDCs derived from both parental strains with an expanded range of pathogenicity, indicating that CDCs can be transmitted from one strain to another and stably maintained in the new genome. We propose a hypothesis whereby the ability to produce AAL toxin and to infect a plant could potentially be distributed among A. alternata strains by horizontal transfer of an entire pathogenicity chromosome. This could provide a possible mechanism by which new pathogens arise in nature