The product of gene 0.3 of bacteriophage T7, ocr, is a potent inhibitor of type I DNA restriction and modification enzymes. We have used biophysical methods to examine the mass, stability, shape and surface charge distribution of ocr. Ocr is a dimeric protein with hydrodynamic behaviour equivalent to a prolate ellipsoid of axial ratio 4.3 +/- 0.7:1 and mass of 27 kDa. The protein is resistant t...

We often see reputation used by regulators to enhance their regulatory leverage, specifically through the implicit threat that a discovered violation today will result in increased inspection intensity in the future. This paper uses the Harford and Harrington (1991) model as the basis to develop a regulatory game in which the regulator commits to an inspection regime based on reputation and fir...

Counterfeiting is a growing problem in national and international trade. We extend the work of Grossman and Shapiro (1988) on consumption externalities in prestige goods markets, and model a general aversion towards large levels of output interacting with a firm-specific aversion towards copies. We show that these externalities play the role of protecting the market share of the producer of ori...

We consider price and service-quality setting in oligopolistic markets for congestible services, applied to the case of private roads. Previous studies show that parallel competitors set a volume/capacity ratio (and thereby a travel time or service quality) that is socially optimal if they take the actions of the others as given. We find that this result does not hold when capacity and toll set...

Education will have externality effects in agriculture if, in the course of conducting their own private economic activities, educated farmers raise the productivity of uneducated farmers with whom they come into contact. This paper seeks to determine the potential size and source of such benefits for rural areas of Ethiopia. Average and stochastic frontier production function methodologies are...

A frame is any payo¤ relevant preference parameter broadly de...ned to include psychological considerations such as reference points, beliefs, aspirations etc. An endogenous frame is a preference parameter that is, in turn, a¤ected by chosen actions. We model decions in two ways. A standard decision problem is one where the chosen action is required to be optimal when the feedback e¤ect from ac...

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated, n-person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how “much” cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group cooperation vary with the group’s size and structure? For an arbitrary distribution of discount factors, we...

Exogenous androgenic steroids applied to pregnant sheep programmes a PCOS-like phenotype in female offspring. Via ultrasound guidance we applied steroids directly to ovine fetuses at d62 and d82 of gestation, and examined fetal (day 90 gestation) and postnatal (11 months old) pancreatic structure and function. Of three classes of steroid agonists applied (androgen - Testosterone propionate (TP)...

We use lab experiments to study policies that address common pool resource overuse. We look at a price mechanism, specifically a Pigouvian subsidy, and four non-price interventions. The non-price policies are information alone, information with a normative message, communication alone, and normative messages with communication allowed. In all experiment sessions, no intervention occurs in the f...

We study the implementation of efficient behavior in settings with externalities. A planner would like to ensure that a group of agents make socially optimal choices, but he only has limited information about the agents' preferences, and can only distinguish individual agents through the actions they choose. We describe the agents' behavior using a stochastic evolutionary model, assuming that t...