Production of recombinant DNA in bacterial cells is an essential technique in molecular biology. Plasmids are usually maintained in an E. coli host by antibiotic selection. However, there are only a few antibiotic-resistance markers available in common use. Here we report the adoption of a novel selection marker, mfabI (mutant fabI) for plasmid propagation in E. coli. mfabI expands the limited ...

Tournament selection is a useful and robust selection mechanism commonly used by genetic algorithms. The selection pressure of tournament selection directly varies with the tournament size | the more competitors , the higher the resulting selection pressure. This article develops a model, based on order statistics, that can be used to quantitatively predict the resulting selection pressure of a...

There is a general presumption that competition is a good thing. In this paper we show that competition in the insurance markets can be bad when there is adverse selection. Using the dual theory of choice under risk, we are able to fully characterize both the competitive and the monopoly market outcomes. When there are two types of risk, the monopoly dominates competition if and only if competi...

We study competitive economies with adverse selection and fully exclusive contractual relationships. We consider economies where agents are privately informed over the probability distribution of their endowments, and trade to insure against this uncertainty. As in Prescott-Townsend (1984), we model exclusivity by imposing the incentive compatibility constraints directly on the agents’ consumpt...

This article investigates the quantityand quality-motivated bandwagon effects on individual movie selection from a cross-cultural perspective. Based on theories of information processing and decision making, we examined how people from different cultural backgrounds (e.g., collective versus individual and vertical versus horizontal cultural orientations) differ in their preferences of aggregate...

The variety of procurement mechanisms present in the today’s e-procurement landscape ranging from electronic catalogue systems over e-negotiations to e-auctions, points at the fact that there exists no single best solution for all sourcing activities. Each mechanism rather has certain advantages and disadvantages. The discipline of economics has traditionally been devoted to the study of market...

Phenotypic matches between plants and their pollinators often are interpreted as examples of reciprocal selection and adaptation. For the two co-occurring plant species, Heliconia bihai and H. caribaea in the Eastern Caribbean, we evaluated for five populations over 2 years the strength and direction of natural selection on corolla length and number of bracts per inflorescence. These plant trai...