The meeting place problem: Salience and search.

The notion of salience was developed by Schelling in the context of the meeting-place problem of locating a partner in the absence of a pre-agreed meeting place. In this paper, we argue that a realistic specification of the meeting place problem involves allowing a strategy of active search over a range of possible meeting places. We solve this extended problem, allowing for extensions such as repeated play, search costs and asymmetric payoffs. The result is a considerably richer, but more complex, notion of salience. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.

The effect of incentive reforms upon productivity: Evidence from the Vietnamese rice industry

In this study we use region-level panel data on rice production in Vietnam to investigate total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the period since reunification in 1975. Two significant reforms were introduced during this period, one in 1981 allowing farmers to keep part of their produce, and another in 1987 providing improved land tenure. We measure TFP growth using two modified forms of the standard Malmquist data envelopment analysis (DEA) method, which we have named the Three-year-window (TYW) and the Full Cumulative (FC) methods. We have developed these methods to deal with degrees of freedom limitations. Our empirical results indicate strong average TFP growth of between 3.3 and 3.5 per cent per annum, with the fastest growth observed in the period following the first reform. Our results support the assertion that incentive related issues have played a large role in the decline and subsequent resurgence of Vietnamese agriculture.

Incentive-based approaches to sustainable fisheries

The failures of traditional target-species management have led many to propose an ecosystem approach to fisheries to promote sustainability. The ecosystem approach is necessary, especially to account for fishery-ecosystem interactions, but by itself is not sufficient to address two important factors contributing to unsustainable fisheries: inappropriate incentives bearing on fishers and the ineffective governance that frequently exists in commercial, developed fisheries managed primarily by total-harvest limits and input controls. We contend that much greater emphasis must be placed on fisher motivation when managing fisheries. Using evidence from more than a dozen natural experiments in commercial fisheries, we argue that incentive-based approaches that better specify community and individual harvest or territorial rights and price ecosystem services and that are coupled with public research, monitoring, and effective oversight promote sustainable fisheries.

Cue salience in multiple cue attentional capture

The predominant use of single element cues in visual attentional capture research motivated examination using dual capture cues. Participants in these studies viewed computer screens briefly displaying sequences of feature-defined positional cues and targets, with target identification response time recorded. Five initial experiments utilising the features of colour (purple) and intensity (bold font), and reported at EPC 2005, revealed contingent capture influences and suggested capture by colour cues may be more powerful than single cue literature has indicated. Three follow-up experiments manipulated displays and defining features to see if the conclusions remained. Experiments 6 and 7 investigated whether target identification in the initial series was based on a featural or singleton search. Experiment 8 then tested "onset' versus "purple" under the condition of specific attentional set, a featural change that appeared to remove purple colour dominance evidenced in the initial experimental series. Overall, outcomes of both experimental series suggest strong salience involvement with overtones of contingent capture for specific featural selections. The novel multi-cue approach revealed the significance of relative salience within these selections.

Prospects for control of African trypanosomiasis by tsetse vector manipulation

The extensive antigenic variation phenomena African trypanosomes display in their mammalian host have hampered efforts to develop effective vaccines against trypanosomiasis. Human disease management aims largely to treat infected hosts by chemotherapy, whereas control of animal diseases relies on reducing tsetse populations as well as on drug therapy. The control strategies for animal diseases are carried out and financed by livestock owners, who have an obvious economic incentive. Sustaining largely insecticide-based control at a local level and relying on drugs for treatment of infected hosts for a disease for which there is no evidence of acquired immunity could prove extremely costly in the long run. It is more likely that a combination of several methods in an integrated, phased and area-wide approach would be more effective in controlling these diseases and subsequently improving agricultural output. New approaches that are environmentally acceptable, efficacious and affordable are clearly desirable for control of various medically and agriculturally important insects including tsetse. Here, Serap Aksoy and colleagues discuss molecular genetic approaches to modulate tsetse vector competence.

Social identity and perceptions of media persuasion: Are we always less influenced than others?

People typically perceive negative media content (e.g., violence) to have more impact on others than on themselves (a third-person effect). To examine the perceived effects of positive content (e.g., public-service advertisements) and the moderating role of social identities, we examined students' perceptions of the impact of AIDS advertisements on self, students (in- group), nonstudents (out-group), and people in general. Perceived self-other differences varied with the salience of student identity. Low identifiers displayed the typical third-person effect, whereas high identifiers were more willing to acknowledge impact on themselves and the student in-group. Further, when influence was normatively accept able within the in-group, high identifiers perceived self and students (us) as more influenced than nonstudents (them). The theoretical and practical implications of this reversal in third-person perceptions are discussed.

Subgroup relations: A comparison of mutual intergroup differentiation and common ingroup identity models of prejudice reduction

Two studies examined relations between groups (humanities and math-science students) that implicitly or explicitly share a common superordinate category (university student). In Experiment 1, 178 participants performed a noninteractive decision-making task during which category salience was manipulated in a 2 (superordinate category salience) x 2 (subordinate category salience) between-groups design. Consistent with the mutual intergroup differentiation model, participants for whom both categories were salient exhibited the lowest levels of bias, whereas bias was strongest when the superordinate category alone was made salient. This pattern of results was replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 135). In addition, Experiment 2 demonstrated that members of subgroups that are nested within a superordinate category are more sensitive to how the superordinate category is represented than are members of subgroups that extend beyond the boundaries of the superordinate category.

Stereotype distinctiveness: How counterstereotypic behavior shapes the self-concept

Three experiments examined the relationship between distinctiveness and self-schematicity. Experiment I revealed that people were more likely to be self-schematic in domains of strong performance when they felt distinct from family and peers in those domains. Experiments 2 and 3 extended this finding into the arena of stereotypes by demonstrating that people were more likely to be self-schematic in domains of strong performance when their performance was counterstereotypic rather than stereotypic. In particular, African Americans and women were more likely to be schematic for intelligence than Caucasians and men if they performed well academically, whereas Caucasians-especially men-were more likely than African Americans to be schematic for athletics if they performed well athletically. These results suggest that counterstereotypic behavior plays a uniquely powerful role in the development of the self-concept.

The land assembly problem revisited

As in the standard land assembly problem, a developer wants to buy two adjacent blocks of land belonging to two different owners. The value of the two blocks of land to the developer is greater than the sum of the individual values of the blocks for each owner. Unlike the land assembly literature, however, our focus is on the incentive that each lot owner has to delay the start of negotiations, rather than on the public goods nature of the problem. An incentive for delay exists, for example, when owners perceive that being last to sell will allow them to capture a larger share of the joint surplus from the development. We show that competition at point of sale can cause equilibrium delay, and that cooperation at point of sale will eliminate delay. This suggests that strategic delay is another source for the inefficient allocation of land, in addition to the public-good type externality pointed out by Grossman and Hart [Bell Journal of Economics 11 (1980) 42] and O'Flaherty [Regional Science and Urban Economics 24 (1994) 287]. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.