When more isn't better: Information and common-property resources

When more is better

Nutrition support of critically ill patients with sepsis is one of the most debated issues among intensivists. The latest international sepsis guidelines recommend the prescription of a low volume of feeds through gastric or intestinal enteral nutrition (EN) for 7 days after admission to the ICU. The data to support such recommendations are scarce, and large trials are needed to clarify this is...

Displacement and Alienation from Common Property Resources

When Is More Not Better?

It is often assumed that when sensing in autonomous robot navigation, the more measurements taken, the better. In many cases, this is indeed true. However, we have found that in an outdoor, unstructured environment where the number of possible measurements one can take is limited and error is not normally distributed, additional measurements may cause more harm than good. These “rogue” measurem...

When more of the same is better

Problem solving (e.g., drug design, traffic engineering, software development) by task forces represents a substantial portion of the economy of developed countries. Here we use an agent-based model of cooperative problem solving systems to study the influence of diversity on the performance of a task force. We assume that agents cooperate by exchanging information on their partial success and ...

Social Opinion and the Use of Common Property Resources∗

Public opinion formation plays a very important role in economic policy development. Opinions put forward in various social platforms offered by the media and the Internet have a large impact on international treaty negotiations. In particular this seems to be the case for international negotiations regarding the abatement of greenhouse gasses. In this paper we argue that social opinion formati...