I consider competitions in which, conditional on winning or losing, the effort exerted by a competitor does not necessarily decrease his payoff. This happens, for example, in competitions for promotions in which workers are intrinsically motivated, and in research and development races in which better performance implies a higher payoff from winning. I characterize players’ equilibrium payoffs ...

In this note, we completely describe the shape of the bisector of two given points in a two-dimensional normed vector space. More precisely, we show that, depending on the position of two given points with respect to the shape of the unit circle, the following holds: the bisector of a non-strict pair of points consists of two cones and a curve, which has properties similar to those of bisectors...

A distinctive feature of modern functional logic languages like Toy or Curry is the possibility of programming non-strict and non-deterministic functions with call-time choice semantics. For almost ten years the CRWL framework [6,7] has been the only formal setting covering all these semantic aspects. But recently [1] an alternative proposal has appeared, focusing more on operational aspects. I...

OBJECTIVE To investigate, in men presenting with recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL), the prevalence of sperm autosome and sex chromosome aneuploidy. DESIGN Retrospective study. SETTING Male infertility clinic. PATIENT(S) A total of 140 men with RPL provided semen samples, and five normozoospermic controls provided 140 semen samples for comparison. Recurrent pregnancy loss, documented in the f...

Cephinae is traditionally divided into three tribes and about 24 genera based on morphology and host utilization. There has been no study testing the monophyly of taxa under a strict phylogenetic criterion. A molecular phylogeny of Cephinae based on a total of 68 sequences of mtDNA COI gene, representing seven genera of Cephinae, is reconstructed to test the traditional limits and relationships...

This case report presents a maxillary third molar with a C-shaped canal system. This is the first known description of a maxillary third molar with C-shaped anatomy. This unique pulp chamber morphology was observed under the operating microscope. Root canal treatment consisted of cleaning and shaping combined with ultrasonic irrigation with sodium hypochlorite. A calcium hydroxide dressing was ...

We show how to answer analogy questions A : B :: C : D of unknown D between word forms, by essentially relying on the basic arithmetic equality D[iB − iA + iC ] = B[iB ] − A[iA] + C[iC ] on characters and positions at the same time. We decompose the problem into two steps: specification and decoding. We examine several techniques to implement each of these two steps. We perform experiments on a...