In this chapter we propose an oligopoly mode] where firms invest in cost zeducing R&D for producing homogeneous goods that are sold in a market. In particular, we assume that R&D efforts build up a "stock of lmowledge", which, in tura, redúces margina] costs of production. Moreover, though ail firms are competitors in the marketplace, they can decide to collaborate through cooperation agreement...

Over the past decades financial investment of non-financial businesses has been rising and accumulation of capital goods has been declining. The first part of the paper offers a novel theory to explain this phenomenon. Financialization, the shareholder revolution and the development of a market for corporate control have shifted power to shareholders and thus changed management priorities, lead...

No existing tool addresses both the development and evaluation process for interactive systems. Current evaluation tools support either the predictive or the experimental approaches to usability testing, and automated tools that make possible experimental evaluation impose a tricky manual instrumentation of the existing code. In this paper we describe CatchIt, a development and usability testin...

A highly osmiophilic structure observed in all pigment-producing mutants of Flavobacterium examined is described. Several factors favor the possibility that this structure might be related to pigment synthesis or pigment accumulation.

The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution is considered the most powerful theory to understand the evolutionary behavior of proteins. One of the main predictions of this theory is that essential proteins should evolve slower than dispensable ones owing to increased selective constraints. Comparison of genomes of different species, however, has revealed only small differences between the rates o...

The analysis of nominal data is often reduced to accumulation and description. Bayesian methods offer a possibility to analyse nominal data in a more sophisticated way. The possibility to indicate a structure via graphical representation, where variables are nodes and relationships are edges, enriches this method and makes it a powerful tool for data analysis. In this paper, an overview on Baye...

Most demographic data indicate a roughly exponential increase in adult mortality with age, a phenomenon that has been explained in terms of a decline in the force of natural selection acting on age-specific mortality. Scattered demographic findings suggest the existence of a late-life mortality plateau in both humans and dipteran insects, seemingly at odds with both prior data and evolutionary ...

One element of the Bologna process are ECTS grades that should be reported together with national grades. While ECTS grades are norm-referenced, most national grading systems in the European Union are criterion-referenced. As “proper statistical methods” were one of the main requirements for establishing ECTS grades (ECTS User’s Guide: European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System and the Di...

In this paper we derive conditions on the internal wear process under which the resulting time-to-failure model will be of the simple collapsible form (Oakes, 1995, Duchesne and Lawless, 2000) when the usage accumulation history is available. We suppose that failure occurs when internal wear crosses a certain threshold and/or a traumatic event causes the item to fail (Cox, 1999 and Bagdonavičiu...