Prizes and Lemons: Procurement of Innovation under Imperfect Commitment

The literature on R&D contests implicitly assumes that contestants submit their innovation regardless of its value. This ignores a potential adverse selection problem. The present paper analyzes the procurement of innovations when the procurer cannot commit to never bargain with innovators who bypass the contest. We compare ?xed-prize tournaments with and without entry fees, and optimal scoring auctions with and without minimum score requirement. Our main result is that the optimal ?xed-prize tournament is more pro?table than the optimal auction since preventing bypass is more costly in the optimal auction

Nanostructuring of glass micro-nanowires

In the past decade, glass fiber tapers with micron or sub-micron diameter have attracted much attention and found a wide range of applications in optics [1] including mode filtering, supercontinuum generation, high-Q resonators and resonant sensing, optical trapping and optical propulsion. Nanofabrication can add new application opportunities, like Fabry-Perot resonators, Scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) probe and surface plasmon resonators

Bibliometric cartography of information retrieval research by using co-word analysis

The aim of this study is to map the intellectual structure of the field of Information Retrieval (IR) during the period of 1987-1997. Co-word analysis was employed to reveal patterns and trends in the IR field by measuring the association strengths of terms representative of relevant publications or other texts produced in IR field. Data were collected from Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for the period of 1987-1997. In addition to the keywords added by the SCI and SSCI databases, other important keywords were extracted from titles and abstracts manually. These keywords were further standardized using vocabulary control tools. In order to trace the dynamic changes of the IR field, the whole 11-year period was further separated into two consecutive periods: 1987-1991 and 1992-1997. The results show that the IR field has some established research themes and it also changes rapidly to embrace new themes

Horizontal mergers with synergies: first-price vs. profit-share auction

We consider takeover bidding in a Cournot oligopoly when firms have private information concerning the synergy effect of merging with a takeover target. Two auction rules are considered: standard first-price and profit-share auctions, supplemented by entry fees. Since non-merged firms benefit from a merger if the synergies are low, bidders are subject to a positive externality. Nevertheless, pooling does not occur; and the profit-share auction is strictly more profitable than the first-price auction, regardless of whether firms observe the synergy parameter or only the winning bid before they play the oligopoly game

Prizes and Lemons: Procurement of Innovation under Imperfect Commitment

The literature on R&D contests implicitly assumes that contestants submit their innovation regardless of its value. This ignores a potential adverse selection problem. The present paper analyzes the procurement of innovations when the procurer cannot commit to never bargain with innovators who bypass the contest. We compare ?xed-prize tournaments with and without entry fees, and optimal scoring auctions with and without minimum score requirement. Our main result is that the optimal ?xed-prize tournament is more pro?table than the optimal auction since preventing bypass is more costly in the optimal auction.innovation; contests; tournaments; auctions; bargaining; adverse

Use of the Metropolis algorithm to simulate the dynamics of protein chains

The Metropolis implementation of the Monte Carlo algorithm has been developed to study the equilibrium thermodynamics of many-body systems. Choosing small trial moves, the trajectories obtained applying this algorithm agree with those obtained by Langevin's dynamics. Applying this procedure to a simplified protein model, it is possible to show that setting a threshold of 1 degree on the movement of the dihedrals of the protein backbone in a single Monte Carlo step, the mean quantities associated with the off-equilibrium dynamics (e.g., energy, RMSD, etc.) are well reproduced, while the good description of higher moments requires smaller moves. An important result is that the time duration of a Monte Carlo step depends linearly on the temperature, something which should be accounted for when doing simulations at different temperatures.Comment: corrections to the text and to the figure

Field theory in superfluid 3He: What are the lessons for particle physics, gravity and high-temperature superconductivity?

There are several classes of homogeneous Fermi-systems which are characterized by the topology of the energy spectrum of fermionic quasiparticles: (1) Gapless systems with a Fermi-surface; (2) Systems with a gap in their spectrum; (3) Gapless systems with topologically stable point nodes (Fermi points); and (4) Gapless systems with topologically unstable lines of nodes (Fermi lines). Superfluid 3He-A and electroweak vacuum belong to the universality Class (3). The fermionic quasiparticles (particles) in this class are chiral: they are left-handed or right-handed. The collective bosonic modes of systems of Class (3) are the effective gauge and gravitational fields. The great advantage of superfluid 3He-A is that we can perform experiments using this condensed matter and thereby simulate many phenomena in high energy physics, including axial anomaly, baryoproduction, and magnetogenesis. 3He-A textures induce a nontrivial effective metrics of the space, where the free quasiparticles move along geodesics. With 3He-A one can simulate event horizons, Hawking radiation, rotating vacuum, etc. High-temperature superconductors are believed to belong to Class (4). They have gapless fermionic quasiparticles with a "relativistic" spectrum close to gap nodes, which allows application of ideas developed for superfluid 3He-A.Comment: RevTex file, 8 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Proc. Nat. Ac. Sc. US, modified after referee reports, references are adde