We study a labour market in which ...rms can observe workers’ output but not their e¤ort, and in which a worker’s productivity in a given ...rm depends on a worker-...rm speci...c component, unobservable for the ...rm. Firms o¤er wage contracts that optimally trade o¤ effort and wage costs. As a result, employed workers enjoy rents, which in turn create unemployment. We show that the incentive ...

In recent years many corporations have become active on social networking sites (SNS). However, our understanding about how and why community members use corporate pages on SNS has not kept pace. In our study, we test a socio-cognitive model of brand page usage to investigate users’ incentives to consume and interact with corporations on Facebook. In order to do so, we conducted an online surve...

Contemporary scientific media production requires a complex socio-technical infrastructure we call the "Media Production Pipeline" (MPP). Media professionals engage with researchers along the MPP to disseminate science news to the lay public. However, differing incentive structures and professional contexts frequently set researchers’ values and needs at odds with those of media professionals, ...

Increasing fuel costs, post-911 security concerns, and economic globalization provide a strong incentive for container carriers to use available container space more efficiently, thereby minimizing the number of container trips and reducing socio-economic vulnerability. A heuristic algorithm based on a tertiary tree model is proposed to handle the container loading problem (CLP) with weakly het...

There is a general need of elaborating energy-effective solutions for managing our increasingly dense interconnected world. The problem should be tackled in multiple dimensions -technology, society, economics, law, regulations, and politicsat different temporal and spatial scales. Holistic approaches will enable technological solutions to be supported by socio-economic motivations, adequate inc...

Misrepresenting private information is often costly, for technological, legal, or psychological reasons. I develop a model of strategic information transmission based on Crawford and Sobel (1982) (CS), but with a convex cost of lying or misreporting. There are three main results. First, I prove that a sequence of monotone equilibria converges to a CS equilibrium as the cost of misreporting shri...

BACKGROUND Evidence regarding the effectiveness of incentive spirometry (ISy) on postoperative pulmonary outcomes after thoracic, cardiac and abdominal surgery remains inconclusive. This is attributed to various methodological issues inherent in ISy trials. Patient compliance has also been highlighted as a possible confounding factor; however, the status of evidence regarding patient compliance...

A smartphone-based tidal volume (V(T)) estimator was recently introduced by our research group, where an Android application provides a chest movement signal whose peak-to-peak amplitude is highly correlated with reference V(T) measured by a spirometer. We found a Normalized Root Mean Squared Error (NRMSE) of 14.998% ± 5.171% (mean ± SD) when the smartphone measures were calibrated using spirom...

The objective of the present study was to evaluate incentive spirometers using volume- (Coach and Voldyne) and flow-oriented (Triflo II and Respirex) devices. Sixteen healthy subjects, 24 +/- 4 years, 62 +/- 12 kg, were studied. Respiratory variables were obtained by respiratory inductive plethysmography, with subjects in a semi-reclined position (45 masculine). Tidal volume, respiratory freque...