Harmful Freedom of Choice: Lessons from the Cellphone Market

This article focuses on the relationship between provider and customer, specifically on the complexity of available contracts in the cellphone market and the ways this complexity might be harmful to consumers. This article aims to elucidate the issues, fleshing them out both as a general phenomenon and as a specific implementation in the cellphone context. The aim is not to provide ultimate solutions, but to show the directions these solutions might take and the difficulties involved

Can We Compensate for Incompensable Harms?

Compensating for harms is the bedrock of the practice of tort law. The hypothetical ideal of making the victim whole guides many a classroom discussion and judicial opinion. Yet we all know that his ideal is often unattainable for a variety of practical and conceptual reasons. Focusing on the conceptual issues, a question might be asked: Are we ever Really able to make the victim whole? In this Article, I aim to stress and develop the aspects of the argument I find most convincing, while critiquing others

Good-Cause Statutes Revisited: An Empirical Assessment

One of the most vital debates in franchise law focuses on whether state or federal law should adopt “good-cause statutes” (GCSs), which require franchisors to show good cause before terminating contractual relations with a franchisee. The traditional law-and-economics analysis suggests that GCSs are inefficient. This inefficiency argument is based upon one central hypothesis: GCSs increase franchisee free riding since they limit the franchisor’s ability to terminate the franchise contract easily. The free-riding hypothesis has been significantly influential in the development of franchise law, as is evident in state and federal statutory regimes. To date, the majority of states and the federal government have refused to adopt GCSs. This Article investigates the free-riding hypothesis empirically and finds it wanting. Direct examination of consumer satisfaction in one of the industries most notoriously susceptible to free riding—hotels serving nonrepeat travelers—shows no significant differences between franchises subject to “at-will” laws and those subject to a GCS. We gathered a sample of 3442 franchised hotels, measured each one along several dimensions of quality, and assessed potential differences using multiple econometric methods. In none did the at-will states outperform the good-cause ones. Implications of our empirical results on the debate over GCSs are discussed in this Article

Good-Cause Statutes Revisited: An Empirical Assessment

One of the most vital debates in franchise law focuses on whether state or federal law should adopt “good-cause statutes” (GCSs), which require franchisors to show good cause before terminating contractual relations with a franchisee. The traditional law-and-economics analysis suggests that GCSs are inefficient. This inefficiency argument is based upon one central hypothesis: GCSs increase franchisee free riding since they limit the franchisor’s ability to terminate the franchise contract easily. The free-riding hypothesis has been significantly influential in the development of franchise law, as is evident in state and federal statutory regimes. To date, the majority of states and the federal government have refused to adopt GCSs. This Article investigates the free-riding hypothesis empirically and finds it wanting. Direct examination of consumer satisfaction in one of the industries most notoriously susceptible to free riding—hotels serving nonrepeat travelers—shows no significant differences between franchises subject to “at-will” laws and those subject to a GCS. We gathered a sample of 3442 franchised hotels, measured each one along several dimensions of quality, and assessed potential differences using multiple econometric methods. In none did the at-will states outperform the good-cause ones. Implications of our empirical results on the debate over GCSs are discussed in this Article

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Parallel Vertex-To-Vertex Radiosity on a Distributed Shared Memory System

In this paper we describe the parallel implementation of the Vertex-To-Vertex Radiosity method on a cluster of PC hosts with a Distributed Shared Memory interface (DSM). We first explain how we use stochastic rays to compute the Form-Factor. We then proceed to describe the implementation of this method on top of the millipede system, a virtual parallel machine that runs on top of available distributed environments. We discuss a step-by-step process for exploiting millipede&apos;s optimization mechanisms. Despite the relatively slow communication medium, the optimization process leads from initial slowdown to high speedups. Preliminary results of this work were presented at the Workshop on Algorithm Engineering, Venice, September 1997. 1 Introduction Fast generation of photorealistic rendering of a scene using computer graphics techniques is one of the most challenging tasks facing researchers today. In the real world, a constant-in-time amount of energy that is emitted by a light sourc..

Vertex-To-Vertex Parallel Radiosity on Clusters of PCs

In this paper we describe the parallel implementation of the Vertex-To-Vertex Radiosity method on a cluster of PC hosts. We first explain the evaluation of the Form-Factor by casting stochastic rays between pairs of vertices for establishing the visibility ratio between them. We then describe an implementation of the Radiosity computation on top of the millipede system, a strong virtual parallel machine that runs (in user mode) on top of standard distributed environments of PC/NT, interconnected by slow communication media such as the Ethernet. The initial result of this distributed implementation is a large slowdown. Using millipede optimization tools we then work step-by-step on improving the locality of the memory references, until eventually we get good speedups. 1. Introduction Fast generation of a photorealistic rendering of a scene using computer graphic techniques is one of the most challenging tasks today. The involved computational complexity is due to complex interactions o..