objective(s) staphylococcus aureus is a foremost source of numerous nosocomial and community acquired infections. antibiotic therapy for vancomycin resistant s. aureus (vrsa) can not promise the eradication of infections. since adhesion is the major route of infections, adhesin based vaccine could suppress s. aureus infections. fibronectin binding protein a (fnbpa) and clumping factor a (clfa) ...

We consider cheap talk by a biased expert comparing multiple issues, e.g., discussion of different spending proposals by an industry lobbyist, evaluation of different stocks by a sell-side analyst, or analysis of different topics by a biased newspaper. When the expert’s motives are sufficiently transparent, we find that cheap talk is credible and influential even when the expert strongly favors...

In this paper, we introduce a notion of epistemic equivalence between hierarchies of conditional beliefs and hierarchies of lexicographic beliefs, thus extending the standard equivalence results of Halpern (2010) and Brandenburger et al. (2007) to an interactive setting, and we show that there is a Borel surjective function, mapping each conditional belief hierarchy to its epistemically equival...

We study the problem of elicitation of subjective beliefs of an agent when the beliefs are ambiguous (the set of beliefs is a non-singleton set) and the agent’s preference exhibits ambiguity aversion; in particular, as represented by α-maxmin preferences. We construct a direct revelation mechanism such that truthful reporting of beliefs is the agent’s unique best response. The mechanism uses kn...

This paper examines the nature of partisan preferences on a range of issue scales. It compares preferences in a period of strong ideological focus, in the late eighties and early nineties, with preferences in 2000 and 2001 – a period of weak ideological focus. Where partisan preferences were formerly polarised, they are now more consensual. I argue that once positional issues now resemble valen...

Many species show substantial between-individual variation in mating preferences, but studying the causes of such variation remains a challenge. For example, the relative importance of heritable variation versus shared early-environmental effects (like sexual imprinting) on mating preferences has never been quantified in a population of animals. Here, we estimate the heritability of and early-r...