Search results for "competition"

The effect of co- and superinfection on the adaptive dynamics of vesicular stomatitis virus

2006

In many infectious diseases, hosts are often simultaneously infected with several genotypes of the same pathogen. Much theoretical work has been done on modelling multiple infection dynamics, but empirical evidences are relatively scarce. Previous studies have demonstrated that coinfection allows faster adaptation than single infection in RNA viruses. Here, we use experimental populations of the vesicular stomatitis Indiana virus derived from an infectious cDNA, to show that superinfection dynamics promotes faster adaptation than single infection. In addition, we have analysed two different periodicities of multiple infection, daily and separated 5 days in time. Daily multiple infections al…

Antibiotrophy: Key Function for Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria to Colonize Soils—Case of Sulfamethazine-Degrading Microbacterium sp. C448

2021

Chronic and repeated exposure of environmental bacterial communities to anthropogenic antibiotics have recently driven some antibiotic-resistant bacteria to acquire catabolic functions, enabling them to use antibiotics as nutritive sources (antibiotrophy). Antibiotrophy might confer a selective advantage facilitating the implantation and dispersion of antibiotrophs in contaminated environments. A microcosm experiment was conducted to test this hypothesis in an agroecosystem context. The sulfonamide-degrading and resistant bacterium Microbacterium sp. C448 was inoculated in four different soil types with and without added sulfamethazine and/or swine manure. After 1 month of incubation, Micro…

Intersexual competition among humans: prosocial towards the opposite sex and proself towards the same sex?

2017

In a research conducted on a sample of participants from three countries (N = 256): Poland, Ukraine and Denmark, a hypothesis of the moderating impact of other person sex on the level of social value orientation of men and women was tested. The study applied the now rarely used method of measuring social value orientation: the Warsaw Method, which was expected to reveal more subtle differences between men and women than those observed in the studies using the most popular social value orientation measurement tools, such as decomposed games. The direction of the observed relationship proved to be compatible with the predictions resulting from the phenomenon of intrasexual competition for a p…

The Maximum Differentiation competition depends on the Viewing Conditions

2016

Competition and R&D in retail banking under expense preference behaviour

2006

Cost-reducing R&D activities are examined in the context of a retail banking sector where some entities exhibit an expense preference. The results reveal that the effects from R&D interact with the effects in the previous literature in shaping the equilibrium configuration.

Incentive Schemes, Private Information and the Double-Edged Role of Competition for Agents

2013

This paper examines the effect of imperfect labor market competition on the efficiency of compensation schemes in a setting with moral hazard and risk-averse agents, who have private information on their productivity. Two vertically differentiated firms compete for agents by offering contracts with fixed and variable payments. The superior firm employs both agent types in equilibrium, but the competitive pressure exerted by the inferior firm has a strong impact on contract design: For high degrees of vertical differentiation, i.e. low competition, low-ability agents are under-incentivized and exert too little effort. For high degrees of competition, high-ability agents are over-incentivized…

Duopoly and Product Design

2014

Competition in product design is considered in the context of a circular duopoly model where each duopolist can choose either a standardized design or a customized version of its product. We examine the circumstances that lead to multiple equilibria, and characterize the type of equilibrium as a function of both the customization costs and the lower bound on the degree of customization. In the welfare analysis, it is shown that the degree of customization offered in equilibrium can be substantially different from the socially optimal level of this variable.

Evaluating European railway deregulation using different approaches

2012

Abstract There has recently been a great deal of interest in the impacts of the deregulating and restructuring measures in the European railway sector. A vast amount of literature is devoted to analyzing the effects of these deregulation and restructuring measures on efficiency and productivity and the results are not totally unambiguous. However, while most of the papers show that the introduction of competition within the sector (in both passenger and freight markets) has had a positive impact in terms of efficiency and productivity, the impact of vertical separation has produced different results in the literature. The contribution of this paper to the existing literature is twofold. Fir…

Tax Competition with Intermunicipal Cooperation

2020

We study local tax competition when municipalities can voluntarily cooperate with neighboring jurisdictions. In France, the strongest form of cooperation among municipalities occurs by forming an “establishment for inter-municipal cooperation” (EIMC). We study how interjurisdictional policy interdependence differs between competing municipalities within the same EIMC and competing municipalities outside of the cooperative unit. We apply the estimation strategy of Kelejian and Piras (2014) to resolve the endogeneity of the decision to cooperate with other municipalities. We find that strategic interactions among peer members of the same EIMC are less intense than strategic interactions with …

Welfare, Home Market Effects, and Horizontal Foreign Direct Investment

2005

We investigate the spatial distribution and organization of an imperfectly competitive industry when firms may choose to operate more than a single production unit. Focusing on a short-run setting with a fixed mass of firms, we fully characterize the spatial equilibria analytically. Comparing the equilibrium and the first-best, we show that both organizational and spatial inefficiencies may arise. In particular, when fixed costs are low enough the market outcome may well lead to overinvestment and, therefore, to too many multinationals operating from a social point of view. Furthermore, once multinationals are taken into account, the market outcome may well lead too little agglomeration.