We study a contest between two teams. The teams include an equal number of players. Each player of a team participates in a component battle, competing against a matched rival from the other team. A team wins if and only if its players prevail in a suffi ciently large number of component battles. The winning team is awarded a prize, which is a public good for all its players. In addition, a pla...

Market efficiency is at the center of the battle of standard finance versus behavioral finance versus investment professionals. But the battle is not joined because the term “market efficiency” has two meanings. One meaning is that investors cannot systematically beat the market. The other is that security prices are rational. Rational prices reflect only utilitarian characteristics, such as ri...

A competition between two or more technologies for becoming the dominant technological standard is a regular occurrence and some popular examples include media formats, Internet browsers, operating systems, game consoles etc. This study introduces an Analytical Framework for Technological Standardization (AFTS) that helps analyze competitors involved in a technical standard competition. This pa...

We construct a unique geocoded dataset on temples, dynasties and battles in medieval India and propose a test to identify the motive for observed temple desecrations in that period. We test two competing historical narratives of temple desecrations. The first focuses on the idea of iconoclasm, i.e. destruction of religious sites and imagery deemed heretical, as embedded in Islamic theology. The...

Smart decision making at the tactical level is important for Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents to perform well in the domain of real-time strategy (RTS) games. Winning battles is crucial in RTS games, and while ahumans can decide when and how to attack based on their experience, it is challenging for AI agents to estimate combat outcomes accurately. A few existing models address this problem ...

Innovative systems and infrastructures such as smart grids, the internet of things, cities, or highways require generally accepted common compatibility standards to enable components of such systems to interoperate. In some cases, various standards are developed by competing standards organizations, often resulting in standards battles. This paper focuses on factors that affect the outcome of t...

One c collaps For thirty years I have read publications about this spate of invasions; and many of them preserve the atmosphere of first-hand reporting by people who have actually seen them happening, and give a feeling of urgency and scale that is absent from the drier summaries of text-books. We must make no mistake: we are seeing one of the great historical convulsions in the world’s fauna a...

Our cloud services are losing too many battles to faults like software bugs, resource interference, and hardware failures. Many tools can help us win these battles: model checkers to verify, fault injection to find bugs, replay to debug, and many more. Unfortunately, tools are currently afterthoughts in cloud service designs that must either be tediously tangled into service implementations or ...