Some views of mutualism, where the fitness of two symbiotic partners is higher in association than when apart, assume that they necessarily evolve towards greater benefit for the partners. Most mutualisms, however, seem prone to conflicts of interest that destabilize the partnership. These conflicts arise in part because mutualistic outcomes are conditional, depending upon complex interactions ...

Pierce’s disease (PD), a lethal disease of grapevine, is caused by Xylella fastidiosa, a Gram-negative, xylem-limited bacterium, transmitted from plant to plant by xylem feeding insects.1 Strains of X. fastidiosa have also been associated with diseases that cause tremendous losses in many other economically important plants including citrus.2 Although the complete genome sequence of X. fastidio...

Infant Directed Speech, or IDS, is often used to address infants and exhibits a variety of properties that differ from adult-directed speech. IDS overemphasizes acoustic cues that aid in segmentation of the continuous speech stream to promote interactions between higher-level linguistic knowledge and bottom-up perceptual processes necessary for successful speech perception thus assisting in the...

How do people consider other minds during cooperation versus competition? Some accounts predict that theory of mind (ToM) is recruited more for cooperation versus competition or competition versus cooperation, whereas other accounts predict similar recruitment across these two contexts. The present fMRI study examined activity in brain regions for ToM (bilateral temporoparietal junction, precun...

We study a model of decentralised bilateral interactions in a small market where one of the sellers has private information about her value. There are two identical buyers and another seller, apart from the informed one, whose valuation is commonly known to be in between the two possible valuations of the informed seller. This represents an attempt to model alternatives to current partners on b...

This paper explores the interdependence between market structure and an important class of extra-rational cognitive biases. Starting with a familiar bilateral monopoly framework, we characterize the endogenous emergence of preference distortions during bargainging which cause negotiators to perceive their private valuations differently than they would outside the adversarial negotiation context...

We provide evidence that long-term relationships between trading parties emerge endogenously in the absence of third party enforcement of contracts and are associated with a fundamental change in the nature of market interactions. Without third party enforcement, the vast majority of trades are initiated with private offers and the parties share the gains from trade equally. Low effort or bad q...

Visual spatial attention is an essential brain function that is produced through the interactions of several cortical and subcortical regions. Using the reversible deactivation technique of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in combination with a visual stimulus detection task, we demonstrated that parietal as well as occipito-parietal cortices in the human brain contribute to spatial atte...

Predicting people other people may like has recently become an important task in many online social networks. Traditional collaborative filtering approaches are popular in recommender systems to effectively predict user preferences for items. However, in online social networks people have a dual role as both “users” and “items”, e.g., both initiating and receiving contacts. Here the assumption ...

Conceptually located between decision analysis and game theory, the emergent field of “negotiation analysis” seeks to develop prescriptive theory and useful advice for negotiators and third parties. It generally emphasizes assessment of the parties’ underlying interests, alternatives to negotiated agreement, approaches to productively manage the inherent tension between competitive actions to “...