For a sequence of subadditive potentials, a method of choosing state points with negative growth rates for an ergodic dynamical system was given in [5]. This paper first generalizes this result to the non-ergodic dynamics, and then proves that under some mild additional hypothesis, one can choose points with negative growth rates from a positive Lebesgue measure set, even if the system does not...

We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over subadditive valuations with independent items, then the better of pricing each item separately or pricing only the grand bundle achieves a constant-factor app...

In classical measure theory, the Radon-Nikodym theorem states in a concise condition, namely domination, how a measure can be factorized by another (bounded) measure through a density function. Several approaches have been undertaken to see under which conditions an exact factorization can be obtained with set functions that are not σ-additive (for instance finitely additive set functions or su...

The functional properties of the entropy gives rise to 6 possible types of thermodynamics. Additivity or superadditivity or subadditivity are closely related to extensivity and this is one of the characteristics used to distinguish the 6 types. We give examples (some are somewhat academic) of all of these, except one. For this purpose we draw also on black hole systems which have been proposed....

Two experiments measured the joint influence of three key sets of semantic features on the frequency with which artifacts (Experiment 1) or plants and creatures (Experiment 2) were categorized in familiar categories. For artifacts, current function outweighed both originally intended function and current appearance. For biological kinds, appearance and behavior, an inner biological function, an...

This paper investigates the pricing of patented traits in the U.S. hybrid corn seed market under imperfect competition. In a multiproduct context, we first examine how substitution/complementarity relationships among products can affect pricing. This is used to motivate multi-product generalizations of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (GHHI) capturing cross-market effects of imperfect competition...

We consider profit-maximization problems for combinatorial auctions with non-single minded valuation functions and limited supply. We obtain fairly general results that relate the approximability of the profit-maximization problem to that of the corresponding social-welfare-maximization (SWM) problem, which is the problem of finding an allocation (S1, . . . , Sn) satisfying the capacity constra...

Comorbid mental disorders are common among suicide decedents. It is unclear if mental disorders in combination confer additive risk for suicide, in other words, if risk associated with two disorders is approximately the sum of the risk conferred by each disorder considered separately, or if there are departures from additivity such that the combined risk is less (i.e., subadditive) or more than...

though dealing with different numbers of agents, share Negotiation among multiple agents remains an important topic of research in Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). Most previous work this subject, however, has focused on bilateral negotiation, deals that are reached between two agents. There has also been research on n-agent agreement which has considered "consensus mechanisms" (such ...