Digital Commons Network^™

Human Mating, Peter K. Jonason, Katherine A. Valentine, Norman P. Li

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Theories and empirical findings of human mating are addressed in this article. Because of differential parental investment, men generally prefer short-term mating and women generally prefer long-term mating, and therefore must negotiate between their differential ideals. Booty-calls, friends-with-benefits, and consensual nonmonogamy are presented as compromises between male and female relationship type ideals. Sexual conflict in the form of infidelity, jealousy, sexual harassment, and rape occur when there is a break-down in negotiations. The adaptive reasons behind these behaviors and preferences are explored.

Beyond Minority Report: Pre-Crime, Pre-Punishment And Pre-Desert, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Utilitarian ethics are apparently incommensurable with other ethical perspectives. Faced with a choice between maximizing general benefit to society and committing an act of injustice, those of us who reject utility in favor of justice are powerless to change the viewpoint of someone who rejects justice in favor of utility. Since there are no higher ethical principles that overarch both principles of utility and principles of justice, both sides must run out of reasons when deciding which principles should be put first. But the unreasoned decision is ineluctable, because there are possible cases in which the principles conflict.1 This kind …

Cultural Construction Of Success And Epistemic Motives Moderate American-Chinese Differences In Reward Allocation Biases, Angela K. Y. Leung, Young-Hoon Kim, Zhi-Xue Zhang, Kim-Pong Tam, Chi-Yue Chiu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

When the relative contribution of the self and the group to a group success is unclear, Americans tend to exhibit a self-serving bias (rewarding the self more than what the self deserves), whereas the Chinese tend to exhibit an other-serving bias (rewarding the group more than the group deserves). In a study comparing the reward allocation biases of Americans and Chinese in different group outcome conditions, the authors showed that the abovementioned cultural difference is found (a) only for culturally congruent success experience (attaining approach goals for Americans and avoidance goals for Chinese) and (b) among individuals who are motivated …

Does The Expression Of Transforming Growth Factor Β-1: Affect The Outcome Of The Radiofrequency Modified Maze Procedure In Patients With Rheumatic Atrial Fibrillation?, Wei Wang, Lei Liu, Yuan Li, Sheng-Shou Hu, Yun-Hu Song, Xin Wang

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

We investigated whether the expression of transforming growth factor β-1 in the left atrial appendage affected the outcome of the radiofrequency modified maze procedure in patients with rheumatic valve disease and long-standing persistent atrial fibrillation.

Messenger RNA and protein expression of transforming growth factor β-1 and volume fractions of collagen types I and III were measured in 80 patients with rheumatic valve atrial fibrillation who underwent valve surgery with the radiofrequency modified maze procedure; the same was done in a control group of 20 patients with rheumatic valve disease and sinus rhythm who underwent valve surgery alone.

At 6 months' …

Bioabsorbable Atrial Septal Occluder For Percutaneous Closure Of Atrial Septal Defect In Children, Osman Baspinar, Mehmet Kervancioglu, Metin Kilinc, Ahmet Irdem

The Texas Heart Institute Journal

The BioSTAR bioabsorbable septal repair implant is a new transcatheter secundum atrial septal defect occlusion device that is absorbed and replaced by healthy native tissue. This retrospective analysis was designed to determine the most significant factors for its successful use in children. From October 2009 through December 2010, 33 children underwent catheterization to close secundum atrial septal defects by means of the BioSTAR. The mean age of the patients was 6.8 ± 3.4 years (range, 2.5-13 yr), and the mean body weight was 22.6 ± 11 kg (range, 11-55 kg). The device was successfully implanted in 91% of patients (30/33). …

Principal-Agent Settings With Random Shocks, Jared Rubin, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Using a gift exchange experiment, we show that the ability of reciprocity to overcome incentive problems inherent in principal-agent settings is greatly reduced when the agent’s effort is distorted by random shocks and transmitted imperfectly to the principal. Specifically, we find that gift exchange contracts without shocks encourage effort and wages well above standard predictions. However, the introduction of random shocks reduces wages and effort, regardless of whether the shocks can be observed by the principal. Moreover, the introduction of shocks significantly reduces the probability of fulfilling the contract by the agent, the payoff of the principal, as well as …

Binding Promises And Cooperation Among Strangers, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari, Maria Bigoni

ESI Working Papers

In an experiment, a group of strangers was randomly divided in pairs to play a prisoners’ dilemma; this process was indefinitely repeated. Cooperation did not increase when subjects could send public messages amounting to binding promises of future play.

Experimental Subjects Are Not Different, Filippos Exadaktylos, Antonio M. Espín, Pablo Brañas-Garza

ESI Working Papers

Experiments using economic games are becoming a major source for the study of human social behavior. These experiments are usually conducted with university students who voluntarily choose to participate. Across the natural and social sciences, there is some concern about how this “particular” subject pool may systematically produce biased results. Focusing on social preferences, this study employs data from a surveyexperiment conducted with a representative sample of a city’s population (N=765). We report behavioral data from five experimental decisions in three canonical games: dictator, ultimatum and trust games. The dataset includes students and non-students as well as volunteers and nonvolunteers. …

Building And Rebuilding Trust With Promises And Apologies, Eric Schniter, Roman M. Sheremeta, Daniel Sznycer

ESI Working Papers

Using trust games, we study how promises and messages are used to build new trust where it did not previously exist and to rebuild damaged trust. In these games, trustees made non-binding promises of investment-contingent returns, then investors decided whether to invest, and finally trustees decided how much to return. After an unexpected second game was announced, but before it commenced, trustees could send a one-way message. This design allowed us to observe the endogenous emergence and natural distribution of trust-relevant behaviors and focus on naturally occurring remedial strategies used by promise-breakers and distrusted trustees, their effects on investors, and …

A Survey Of Experimental Research On Contests, All-Pay Auctions And Tournaments, Emmanuel Dechenaux, Dan Kovenock, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey provides a review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the contest success function, number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multibattle contests. Then we review research on sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, and contests between …

Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth: How The Tragedy Of The Anticommons Emerges In Organizations, Matthew W. Mccarter, Shirli Kopelman, Thomas A. Turk, Candace Ybarra

ESI Working Papers

In organizations, conflict often revolves around commons resources because they are critical for influence, performance, and organizational survival. Research on property rights, territoriality, and social dilemmas suggests that to reduce such conflict, organizations should facilitate the (psychological) privatization of commons resources. We complement these three literatures by drawing from the legal, organizational, and social psychology literatures to model how psychologically privatizing organizational commons resources – to prevent a tragedy of the commons (an overuse problem) – can lead to the emergence of equivalently problematic tragedy in organizations: the tragedy of the anticommons (an underuse problem). Our model contributes to these …

Do Liars Believe? Beliefs And Other-Regarding Preferences In Sender-Receiver Games, Roman M. Sheremeta, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Working Papers

We examine subjects‟ behavior in sender-receiver games where there are gains from trade and alignment of interests in one of the two states. We elicit subjects‟ beliefs, risk and other-regarding preferences. Our design also allows us to examine the behavior of subjects in both roles, to determine whether the behavior in one role is the best response to the subject‟s own behavior in the other role. The results of the experiment indicate that 60 percent of senders adopt deceptive strategies by sending favorable message when the true state of the nature is unfavorable. Nevertheless, 67 percent of receivers invest conditional …

Winner-Take-All And Proportional-Prize Contests: Theory And Experimental Results, Roman M. Sheremeta, William A. Masters, Timothy N. Cason

ESI Working Papers

This study provides a unified theoretical and experimental framework in which to compare three canonical types of competition: winner-take-all contests won by the best performer, winner-take-all lotteries where probability of success is proportional to performance, and proportional-prize contests in which rewards are shared in proportion to performance. We introduce random noise to reflect imperfect information, and collect independent measures of risk aversion, other-regarding preferences, and the utility of winning a contest. The main finding is that efforts are consistently higher with winner-take-all contests. The lottery contests have the same Nash equilibrium as proportional prizes, but induce contestants to choose higher …

Extremism Drives Out Moderation, Bettina Klose, Dan Kovenock

ESI Working Papers

This article investigates the impact of the distribution of preferences on equilibrium behavior in conflicts that are modeled as all-pay auctions with identity-dependent externalities. In this context, we define centrists and radicals using a willingness-topay criterion that admits preferences more general than a simple ordering on the line. Through a series of examples, we show that substituting the auction contest success function for the lottery contest success function in a conflict may alter the relative expenditures of centrists and radicals in equilibrium. Extremism, characterized by a higher per capita expenditure by radicals than centrists, may persist and lead to a …

Information Effects In Multi-Unit Dutch Auctions, Joy A. Buchanan, Steven Gjerstad, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

We design a multi-unit descending-price (Dutch) auction mechanism that has applications for resource allocation and pricing problems. We address specific auction design choices by theoretically and experimentally determining optimal information disclosure along two dimensions. Bidders are either informed of the number of bidders in the auction, or know that it is one of two possible sizes; they also either know the number of units remaining for sale or are unaware of how many units have been taken by other bidders. We find that revealing group size decreases bids, and therefore revenue, if units remaining are not shown. When group size …

Side-Payments And The Costs Of Conflict, Erik O. Kimbrough, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Conflict and competition often impose costs on both winners and losers, and conflicting parties may prefer to resolve the dispute before it occurs. The equilibrium of a conflict game with side-payments predicts that with binding offers, proposers make and responders accept side-payments, generating settlements that strongly favor proposers. When side-payments are non-binding, proposers offer nothing and conflicts always arise. Laboratory experiments confirm that binding side-payments reduce conflicts. However, 30% of responders reject binding offers, and offers are more egalitarian than predicted. Surprisingly, non-binding side-payments also improve efficiency, although less than binding. With binding side-payments, 87% of efficiency gains come from …

Perceived Partner Support In Pregnancy Predicts Lower Maternal And Infant Distress, Lynlee R. Tanner Stapleton, Christine Dunkel Schetter, Erika Westling, Christine Rini, Laura M. Glynn, Calvin J. Hobel, Curt A. Sandman

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Maternal postpartum emotional distress is quite common and can pose significant risk to mothers and infants. The current study investigated mothers' relationships with their partners during pregnancy and tested the hypotheses that perception of prenatal partner support is a significant predictor of changes in maternal emotional distress from midpregnancy to postpartum, and contributes to maternal ratings of infant distress to novelty. Using a prospective longitudinal design, 272 adult pregnant women were interviewed regarding their partner support, relationship satisfaction, and interpersonal security (attachment style and willingness to seek out support), and they completed standardized measures of prenatal symptoms of depression and …

Increasing Parity Is Associated With Cumulative Effects On Memory, Laura M. Glynn

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this investigation was to determine if reproductive experience is associated with cumulative effects on human memory performance during pregnancy and if these effects persist into the postpartum period.

METHODS: Verbal recall memory performance was assessed in 254 women four times during pregnancy and at 3 months postpartum. The relation between parity and memory function was evaluated with hierarchical linear modeling and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA).

RESULTS: The data indicate that the previously documented adverse effects of pregnancy on memory performance are compounded with successive pregnancies. During gestation and postpartum, multiparity was associated with poorer memory function, …

Self-Organizing Biopsychosocial Dynamics And The Patient-Healer Relationship, David Pincus

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The patient-healer relationship has an increasing area of interest for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) researchers. This focus on the interpersonal context of treatment is not surprising as dismantling studies, clinical trials and other linear research designs continually point toward the critical role of context and the broadband biopsychosocial nature of therapeutic responses to CAM. Unfortunately, the same traditional research models and methods that fail to find simple and specific treatment-outcome relations are similarly failing to find simple and specific mechanisms to explain how interpersonal processes influence patient outcomes. This paper presents an overview of some of the key models …

Shoulder-And Back-Muscle Activation During Shoulder Abduction And Flexion Using A Bodyblade Pro Versus Dumbbells, Joseph S. Parry, Rachel Straub, Daniel Cipriani

Physical Therapy Faculty Articles and Research

Context: The Bodyblade Pro is used for shoulder rehabilitation after injury. Resistance is provided by blade oscillations—faster oscillations or higher speeds correspond to greater resistance. However, research supporting the Bodyblade Pro’s use is scarce, particularly in comparison with dumbbell training. Objective: To compare muscle activity, using electromyography (EMG), in the back and shoulder regions during shoulder exercises with the Bodyblade Pro vs dumbbells. Design: Randomized crossover study. Setting: San Diego State University biomechanics laboratory. Participants: 11 healthy male subjects age 19–32 y. Intervention: Subjects performed shoulder-flexion and -abduction exercises using a Bodyblade Pro and …

The New Publishing Scene And The Tenure Case: An Administrator’S View, Daniele C. Struppa

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

No abstract provided.

Bicomplex Numbers And Their Elementary Functions, M. E. Luna-Elizarrarás, M. Shapiro, Daniele C. Struppa, Adrian Vajiac

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

In this paper we introduce the algebra of bicomplex numbers as a generalization of the field of complex numbers. We describe how to define elementary functions in such an algebra (polynomials, exponential functions, and trigonometric functions) as well as their inverse functions (roots, logarithms, inverse trigonometric functions). Our goal is to show that a function theory on bicomplex numbers is, in some sense, a better generalization of the theory of holomorphic functions of one variable, than the classical theory of holomorphic functions in two complex variables.

Persons Affected By Traumatic Brain Injury In The Workplace; Implications For Employee Assistance Programs, Dale Margolin Cecka

Law Faculty Publications

Employee Assistance Programs often provide behavioral health services to employees. The article discusses issues related to employees affected by traumatic brain injury such as psychosocial challenges that may accompany reentry into the workplace. Strategies that employers may utilize to accommodate such challenges are presented. Implications for practitioners are explored within the context of the Americans with Disabilities Act, disability management, and human resources.

The Shape Of Things To Come: What We Can Learn From Patent Claim Length, Kristen Jakobsen Osenga

Law Faculty Publications

Technology is always changing. Patent law is also constantly evolving, as the courts and Congress continue to make significant changes to this area of law. But what about patents themselves? Some studies have looked at how patent specifications have changed over time, but no one has looked specifically at the most important aspect of a patent, its claims. Given the changes in technology and law, one would anticipate patent claims to have evolved.

Despite the expectations, this paper concludes that patent claim shape is largely unaffected by time, technology, crowded fields, or prosecution time. This paper suggests a possible reason …

2010-2011 Veterans Law Update, Tara L. Casey

Law Faculty Publications

2011 saw multiple changes to the laws relating to veterans, their rights and benefits, and the Department of Veterans Affairs ("VA"). This Article will cover select updates to the field of veterans law codified in the Code of Federal Regulations and the United States Code, proposed in the Federal Register, and adjudicated in the courts. Part I will cover updates related directly to veterans' benefits and rights. Part II will focus on updates to rules involving veterans' caregivers and healthcare facilities. Part III will cover proposed rules dealing with veterans' claims and insurance. Part IV will focus on rules and …

Distributed Energy Resources, "Virtual Power Plants," And The Smart Grid, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

The specific focus of this Article is on the "virtual power plant" (VPP) concept, an intriguing idea that involves an aggregation of DERs to provide a "fleet" of resources that can serve as the functional equivalent of a traditional power plant. As the name suggests, this fleet of DERs can add up in the aggregate to the equivalent of a significant resource. Under certain conditions, this resource can be used on the grid (i.e., dispatched) much as a conventional power plant would be. This could reduce demand for fossil fuel-fired plants by enabling a utility to avoid generating electricity or …

Autonomy-Mastery-Purpose: Structuring Clinical Courses To Enhance These Critical Goals, Leah Wortham, Catherine F. Klein, Beryl Blaustone

Scholarly Articles

Part I describes the difference in extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and reviews the negative effects of business and educational models assuming extrinsic motivation to be most effective rather than seeking to stimulate intrinsic motivation. Part II describes the Carnegie Foundation's Preparation for the Professions project's call for law schools to focus on law students' sense of identity and purpose as part of their professional education, as well as noting the similar goal that students learn "how to be" as articulated by the Tuning Project of the Bologna process regarding higher education in Europe. Part III provides basics on the theory …

The Plural Of Anecdote Is Not Data: Teaching Law Students Basic Survey Methodology To Improve Access To Justice In Unemployment Insurance Appeals, Faith Mullen

Scholarly Articles

This project is part of Professor Mullen's larger Bellow Scholars research agenda, which concerns access-to-justice issues at the OAH more generally. This project tried to ascertain whether self-represented parties (both employees3 and employers) in unemployment insurance (UI) appeals perceive a need for more legal assistance. For three weeks in November of 2009, law students from The Catholic University of America administered a survey that asked self-represented parties in UI appeals whether, based on their experiences in the hearing, they perceived a need for more legal assistance and whether there were aspects of the hearings that they found particularly challenging. Initially …

Federalism, Individual Rights And Judicial Engagement, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

Contemporary “rights talk” under the American Constitution tends to focus on individual rights or those rights that can be perfected in the case of a single individual. This would include, for example, the rights to free expression, free exercise of religion, sexual autonomy, or the right to equal treatment. Under the broad umbrella of individual-rights talk, theoretical discussions generally involve whether courts ought to recognize a particular individual right or what level of scrutiny (or engagement) ought to apply to judicially identified individual rights.

From the beginning of our history as a nation, however, the concept of legally cognizable rights …

Google Books: Finally, An Actual Fair Use Ruling!, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

One of our favorite topics in this Intellectual Property Issues series – perhaps the favorite – is Google Books, the massive project through which Google hopes to bring its search capability to the text of all books in the English language. To make a book’s text searchable, however, Google must scan the book. And scanning is copying. And copying usually means copyright infringement. Certainly the many authors and publishers who have sued Google take this view.

There are two ways to avoid infringement when copying a copyrighted book: get a license or prove that the copying constitutes fair use. Many …