We present a simple and natural non-pricing mechanism for allocating divisible goods among strategic agents having lexicographic preferences. Our mechanism has favorable properties of strategy-proofness (incentive compatibility). In addition (and even when extended to the case of Leontief bundles) it enjoys Pareto efficiency, envy-freeness, and time efficiency. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F...

BACKGROUND Medical students develop interest in a specialty career during medical school based on knowledge and clinical experience of different specialties. How valid this knowledge is and how this knowledge relates to the development of preference for a specialty is not known. We studied their "subjective" knowledge of a specialty (students' reported knowledge) with "objective" knowledge of i...

T he 2008 annual Math Awareness Month theme features the unusual combination of “Mathematics and Voting”. The importance of voting is obvious; indeed, with the United States election season hard upon us, discussions about voting are seemingly nonstop. More generally, on almost any day of any year the news media reports on some consequential election going on somewhere in the world. But what doe...

Dear Editor, I read with interest the study done by Chua and colleagues1 on the attitudes of first-year medical students towards older adults and their willingness to consider a career in Geriatric medicine (GRM). It was a survey of a cohort of 250 firstyear medical students prior to any clinical exposure at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and their attitudes were measured on the UCL...

Background: Empathy is an important element of physician-patient communication. Empathy is linked to a number of attributes such as patient treatment compliance and satisfaction, better history taking and physical examination and therefore achieving better clinical outcomes. Previous research indicates that self-reported empathy among medical students declines during the course of their medical...