Being selective does not pay off

Does opportunism pay off?

In Portugal, increases in investment expenditures and changes in the composition of spending favouring highly visible items are associated with higher vote percentages for incumbent mayors seeking re-election. The political payoff to opportunistic spending increased after democracy became well-established in the country. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Does Crop Diversification Pay Off

Because of its potential role in providing ecosystem services and private benefits (food security), the concern about the loss of agrobiodiversity has grown. We explore the links between agrobiodiversity and farm financial benefits in small-scale agroecosystems. We measured crop diversity in a subsistence-oriented agricultural production system: home gardens (n=250) in the Iberian Peninsula. We...

When Does Model-Based Control Pay Off?

Many accounts of decision making and reinforcement learning posit the existence of two distinct systems that control choice: a fast, automatic system and a slow, deliberative system. Recent research formalizes this distinction by mapping these systems to "model-free" and "model-based" strategies in reinforcement learning. Model-free strategies are computationally cheap, but sometimes inaccurate...

Certified Coffee: Does the Premium Pay Off?

Prior residency does not always pay off--co-infections in Daphnia.

The epidemiological and ecological processes which govern the success of multiple-species co-infections are as yet unresolved. Here we investigated prior versus late residency within hosts, meaning which parasite contacts the host first, to determine if the outcomes of intra-host competition are altered. We infected a single genotype of the waterflea Daphnia galeata with both the intestinal pro...