Envy – an Unwanted, yet Unavoidable and Necessary Emotion

Noise in multiple sclerosis: unwanted and necessary

As our knowledge about the etiology of multiple sclerosis (MS) increases, deterministic paradigms appear insufficient to describe the pathogenesis of the disease, and the impression is that stochastic phenomena (i.e. random events not necessarily resulting in disease in all individuals) may contribute to the development of MS. However, sources and mechanisms of stochastic behavior have not been...

Orphan drugs: expensive yet necessary.

Whether the prices of certain orphan treatments are justified is highly controversial. One argument is that such therapies should not be funded through the public purse or private health plans because a patient with a rare disease requires more than their 'fair share' of a limited health care budget. Orphan medications can also be denied because they fare poorly in the cost-effectiveness assess...

social accountability in nursing education: a necessary yet neglected issue

Unavoidable and Almost Unavoidable Sets of Words

A set of words over a finite alphabet is called an unavoidable set if every word of sufficiently long length must contain some word from this set as a subword. Motivated by a theorem from automata theory, we introduce the notion of an almost unavoidable set and prove certain asymptotic estimates for the size of almost unavoidable sets of uniform length.

Envy, Multi Envy, and Revenue Maximization

We study the envy free pricing problem faced by a seller who wishes to maximize revenue by setting prices for bundles of items. Consistent with standard usage [9] [10], we define an allocation/pricing to be envy free if no agent wishes to replace her allocation (and pricing) with those of another agent. If there is an unlimited supply of items and agents are single minded then we show that find...