2015 2 Acknowledgements I am grateful for the continuous support and guidance of my advisor, Jimmy Roberts. I would also like to thank Professors Michelle Connolly and Tracy Falba for their helpful feedback and revisions as my honors seminar instructors. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my classmates in my honors seminar for their valuable comments during class presentations. Abstract In an...

C are a historically important and increasingly popular mechanism for encouraging innovation. A central concern in designing innovation contests is how many competitors to admit. Using a unique data set of 9,661 software contests, we provide evidence of two coexisting and opposing forces that operate when the number of competitors increases. Greater rivalry reduces the incentives of all competi...

Several chronic respiratory diseases are characterized by recurrent and/or persistent infections, chronic inflammatory responses and tissue remodeling, including increased levels of glycosaminoglycans which are known structural components of the airways. Among glycosaminoglycans, heparan sulfate (HS) has been suggested to contribute to excessive inflammatory responses. Here, we aim at (i) inves...

Firms have an incentive to test competitors’ products to reveal violations of safety and environmental standards, in order to have competitors’ products blocked from sale. This paper shows that testing by a regulator crowds out testing by competitors, and can reduce firms’ efforts to comply with the product standard. Relying on competitor testing (i.e., having the regulator test only to verify ...

The rapid increase in production of ethanol from corn and other grains and biodiesel from various fats and oils has resulted in growing quantities of byproducts from these industries, primarily distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) from the ethanol industry and glycerol from biodiesel production. The use of DDGS in poultry and swine diets is not new, but the supply of product encourages ...

Word recognition performance was measured for 18 normal-hearing subjects using the female talker version of the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 (NU-6) in the presence of three background competitors: (1) a meaningful multitalker competing message consisting of three male and three female talkers (forward multitalker competing message [FCM]), (2) the same multitalker competing messag...