"MIATA"-minimal information about T cell assays.

Immunotherapy, especially therapeutic vaccination, has a great deal of potential in the treatment of cancer and certain infectious diseases such as HIV (Allison et al., 2006; Fauci et al., 2008; Feldmann and Steinman, 2005). Numerous vaccine candidates have been tested in patients with a variety of tumor types and chronic viral diseases. Often, the best way to assess the clinical potential of these vaccines is to monitor the induced T cell response, and yet there are currently no standards for reporting these results. This letter is an effort to address this problem.

Inequality, Happiness and Relative Concerns: What Actually is their Relationship?

This paper briefly and informally surveys different theoretical models of relative concerns and their relation to inequality. Models of inequity aversion in common use in experimental economics imply a negative relation between inequality and happiness. In contrast, empirical studies on happiness typically employ models of relative concerns that assume that increases in others’ income always have a negative effect on own happiness. However, in these latter models, the relation between inequality and happiness can be positive. One possible solution is a rivalry model where a distinction is made between endowment and reward inequality which have respectively a negative and positive effect on happiness. These different models and their contrasting results may clarify why the empirical relationship between inequality and happiness has been difficult to establish.

Bargaining and Conflict with Incomplete Information

This paper studies bargaining and conflict under incomplete information, provides an overview and a critical account of the literature on the topic and contributes with original research. We first revise models of mechanism design and sequential bargaining that take confrontation as final. Conflict and inefficiencies are to be expected in these models whenever parties have optimistic prospects on the outcome of the all-out conflict. After examining the causes and reasons for this optimism, we move to the analysis of the recent literature that considers the existence of limited confrontations that allow bargaining to resume. In the presence of private information, these limited conflicts convey information and thus become a bargaining instrument. The paper closes with a discussion on the related empirical literature, the challenges that it faces and some potential avenues for further research.

Spatial modelling of biodiversity at the community level

1. Statistical modelling is often used to relate sparse biological survey data to remotely derived environmental predictors, thereby providing a basis for predictively mapping biodiversity across an entire region of interest. The most popular strategy for such modelling has been to model distributions of individual species one at a time. Spatial modelling of biodiversity at the community level may, however, confer significant benefits for applications involving very large numbers of species, particularly if many of these species are recorded infrequently. 2. Community-level modelling combines data from multiple species and produces information on spatial pattern in the distribution of biodiversity at a collective community level instead of, or in addition to, the level of individual species. Spatial outputs from community-level modelling include predictive mapping of community types (groups of locations with similar species composition), species groups (groups of species with similar distributions), axes or gradients of compositional variation, levels of compositional dissimilarity between pairs of locations, and various macro-ecological properties (e.g. species richness). 3. Three broad modelling strategies can be used to generate these outputs: (i) 'assemble first, predict later', in which biological survey data are first classified, ordinated or aggregated to produce community-level entities or attributes that are then modelled in relation to environmental predictors; (ii) 'predict first, assemble later', in which individual species are modelled one at a time as a function of environmental variables, to produce a stack of species distribution maps that is then subjected to classification, ordination or aggregation; and (iii) 'assemble and predict together', in which all species are modelled simultaneously, within a single integrated modelling process. These strategies each have particular strengths and weaknesses, depending on the intended purpose of modelling and the type, quality and quantity of data involved. 4. Synthesis and applications. The potential benefits of modelling large multispecies data sets using community-level, as opposed to species-level, approaches include faster processing, increased power to detect shared patterns of environmental response across rarely recorded species, and enhanced capacity to synthesize complex data into a form more readily interpretable by scientists and decision-makers. Community-level modelling therefore deserves to be considered more often, and more widely, as a potential alternative or supplement to modelling individual species.

Optimal contracting with private information on cost expectation and variability

We study the screening problem that arises in a framework where, initially, the agent is privately informed about both the expected production cost and the cost variability and, at a later stage, he learns privately the cost realization. The speci c set of relevant incentive constraints, and so the characteristics of the optimal mechanism, depend nely upon the curvature of the principal s marginal surplus function as well as the relative importance of the two initial information problems. Pooling of production levels is optimally induced with respect to the cost variability when the principal's knowledge imperfection about the latter is sufficiently less important than that about the expected cost.

Delay and Haircuts in Sovereign Debt: Recovery and Sustainability

One of the striking aspects of recent sovereign debt restructurings is, conditional on default, delay length is positively correlated with the size of haircut. In this paper, we develop an incomplete information model of debt restructuring where the prospect of uncertain economic recovery and the signalling about sustainability concerns together generate multi-period delay. The results from our analysis show that there is a correlation between delay length and size of haircut. Such results are supported by evidence. We show that Pareto ranking of equilibria, conditional on default, can be altered once we take into account the ex ante incentive of sovereign debtor. We use our results to evaluate proposals advocated to ensure orderly resolution of sovereign debt crises.

Bioinformática: consultas cruzadas a bases de datos biomédicas remotas

En la presente memoria se detallan con exactitud los pasos y procesos realizados para construir una aplicación que posibilite el cruce de datos genéticos a partir de información contenida en bases de datos remotas. Desarrolla un estudio en profundidad del contenido y estructura de las bases de datos remotas del NCBI y del KEGG, documentando una minería de datos con el objetivo de extraer de ellas la información necesaria para desarrollar la aplicación de cruce de datos genéticos. Finalmente se establecen los programas, scripts y entornos gráficos que han sido implementados para la construcción y posterior puesta en marcha de la aplicación que proporciona la funcionalidad de cruce de la que es objeto este proyecto fin de carrera.

The Corrosion of Career? - Occupational Trajectories of Business Economists and Engineers in Switzerland

Achievement careers are regarded as a distinctive element of the post-war period in occidental societies. Such a career was at once a modal trajectory of the modern parts of middleclass men and a social emblem for progress and success. However, if the achievement career came to be a biographical pattern with great normative power, its precise sequential course remained vague. Theories of the 1960s and 1970s described it as an orderly advancement within large firms. By the 1990s, scholars postulated an erosion of the organizational structures that once contributed to the institutionalization of careers, accompanied by a weakening of the normative weight of the achievement career by management discourse. We question the thesis of the corrosion of achievement career by analysing the trajectories of 442 engineers and business economists in Switzerland in regard to their orderliness, loyalty, and temporal rhythm. An inspection of types of careers and cohorts reveals that even if we face a decline of loyalty over time, hierarchical orderliness is not touched by those changes. Foremost, technical-industrial careers fit the loyal and regular pattern. Hence, this trajectory-type represents only a minority and is by far the slowest and least successful in terms of hierarchical ascension.

The Market for "Rough Diamonds": Information, Finance and Wage Inequality

During the past four decades both between and within group wage inequality increased significantly in the US. I provide a microfounded justification for this pattern, by introducing private employer learning in a model of signaling with credit constraints. In particular, I show that when financial constraints relax, talented individuals can acquire education and leave the uneducated pool, this decreases unskilled inexperienced wages and boosts wage inequality. This explanation is consistent with US data from 1970 to 1997, indicating that the rise of the skill and the experience premium coincides with a fall in unskilled-inexperienced wages, while at the same time skilled or experienced wages do not change much. The model accounts for: (i) the increase in the skill premium despite the growing supply of skills; (ii) the understudied aspect of rising inequality related to the increase in the experience premium; (iii) the sharp growth of the skill premium for inexperienced workers and its moderate expansion for the experienced ones; (iv) the puzzling coexistence of increasing experience premium within the group of unskilled workers and its stable pattern among the skilled ones. The results hold under various robustness checks and provide some interesting policy implications about the potential conflict between inequality of opportunity and substantial economic inequality, as well as the role of minimum wage policy in determining the equilibrium wage inequality.

Donor's and organ representations in liver, kidney, heart and lung transplantation : a qualitative longitudinal study

Purpose: Organ transplantation is a biological and psychological challenge and graft acceptance is an important achievement for patients. Patients' concerns toward the deceased donor and the organ may contribute to this process. Method: Forty-seven patients involved in heart (N=9), liver (N=8), lung (N=14) and kidney (N=16) transplantation participated in IRB-approved longitudinal semi-structured interviews: (T1) registered on the waiting-list, (T2) six months and (T3) twelve months after transplantation. Qualitative pattern analysis (QUAPA) was carried out on the verbatim transcripts and concerns about the donor and the organ were then analysed. Results: - Donor's representation: At T1, patients were reluctant to talk about the donor: 27% expressed culpability and 19% accepted the clause of anonymity. At T2, intense emotions were associated with the reminiscing about the donor and 45% highlighted the generosity of his/her act. In addition, heart, lung and kidney recipients were concerned about the donor's identity: 42% challenged the clause of anonymity. Liver recipients complained about anonymity, but could nevertheless cope with it. At T3, 47% of heart, lung and kidney recipients thought daily of the donor and 33% were still looking for information about him/her. Liver recipients rarely have thoughts about the donor. - Organ representation: At T1, organ descriptions were biomedical (49% of the interviewees) and more rarely, mainly heart candidates, referred to the symbolic meaning of the organ. After transplantation (T2-T3), function was underlined. Acceptance and organ integration were associated with post-operative outcomes (23%) and psychological well-being (45%). Some patients (32%) inferred the donor's personality from the organ quality and felt privileged having received an organ in such a good state. Conclusion: Donor's representations should be explored during the transplantation process as they play an important role in the psychological acceptance of the graft.

How private is private information? The ability to spot deception in an economic game

We provide experimental evidence on the ability to detect deceit in a buyer-seller game with asymmetric information. Sellers have private information about the buyer's valuation of a good and sometimes have incentives to mislead buyers. We examine if buyers can spot deception in face-to-face encounters. We vary (1) whether or not the buyer can interrogate the seller, and (2) the contextual richness of the situation. We find that the buyers' prediction accuracy is above chance levels, and that interrogation and contextual richness are important factors determining the accuracy. These results show that there are circumstances in which part of the information asymmetry is eliminated by people's ability to spot deception.

What is the Causal Effect of Information and Learning about a Public Good on Willingness to Pay?

In this study we elicit agents’ prior information set regarding a public good, exogenously give information treatments to survey respondents and subsequently elicit willingness to pay for the good and posterior information sets. The design of this field experiment allows us to perform theoretically motivated hypothesis testing between different updating rules: non-informative updating, Bayesian updating, and incomplete updating. We find causal evidence that agents imperfectly update their information sets. We also field causal evidence that the amount of additional information provided to subjects relative to their pre-existing information levels can affect stated WTP in ways consistent overload from too much learning. This result raises important (though familiar) issues for the use of stated preference methods in policy analysis.

The Impact of Information Provision on Agglomeration Bonus Performance: An Experimental Study on Local Networks

The Agglomeration Bonus (AB) is a mechanism to induce adjacent landowners to spatially coordinate their land use for the delivery of ecosystem services from farmland. This paper uses laboratory experiments to explore the performance of the AB in achieving the socially optimal land management configuration in a local network environment where the information available to subjects varies. The AB poses a coordination problem between two Nash equilibria: a Pareto dominant and a risk dominant equilibrium. The experiments indicate that if subjects are informed about both their direct and indirect neighbors’ actions, they are more likely to coordinate on the Pareto dominant equilibrium relative to the case where subjects have information about their direct neighbors’ action only. However, the extra information can only delay – and not prevent – the transition to the socially inferior risk dominant Nash equilibrium. In the long run, the AB mechanism may only be partially effective in enhancing delivery of ecosystem services on farming landscapes featuring local networks.