Peer-punishment is effective in promoting cooperation, but the costs associated with punishing defectors often exceed the benefits for the group. It has been argued that centralized punishment institutions can overcome the detrimental effects of peer-punishment. However, this argument presupposes the existence of a legitimate authority and leaves an unresolved gap in the transition from peer-pu...

OBJECTIVES To describe and examine the factors that most facilitate and impede the provision of healthy foods in a complex institutional food system. STUDY DESIGN Comparative case study of three institutional food settings in New York City. METHODS Document review and interviews with relevant city government staff. RESULTS Factors that facilitate and impede the provision of healthy food v...

in iran, new centralization characteristic, especially during pahlavi dynasty, has been convergence and its vast use in bureaucracy. historical sociological studies have consensus on the issues of centralization, power centralization, and political sovereignty in iran; however, these issues have some divisional interruptions and different levels of strength in some parts of the history. this es...

Researchers in the field of adaptive behavior are quite familiar with the idea of higher-order complex global patterns emerging from the lower-level simple local interactions of components in a distributed system. Our artificial ants form colonies and self-organized foraging expeditions; our robots and simulated birds flock and cooperate on tasks; our genetic algorithm populations form species ...

Centralized markets reduce the costs of search for buyers and sellers. Their ‘thickness’ increases the chance of order execution at competitive prices. In spite of the incentives to consolidate, some markets, securities markets and online advertising being the most notable, are fragmented into multiple trading venues. We argue that fragmentation is an inevitable feature of any centralized marke...

This paper presents the conceptual structure of the virtual university information system. Information technologies are needed that provides the ability not only to present educational material, but also to effectively manage the learning process, resources and the educational institution itself in a centralized manner. A system of distance learning must be an integral part of the organizationa...

A standard problem in operations literature is optimal stocking of substitutable products. We consider a very general consumer-driven substitution problem with an arbitrary number of products and a quite general substitution structure, both under centralized inventory management and competition. We obtain analytically tractable solutions that generalize and extend the results of several earlier...

We will attempt to show how human performance limitations on various types of syntactic embedding constructions in Germanic languages can be modelled in a relational network linguistic framework. After arguing against centralized data stores such as pushdown stacks and queues, we will demonstrate how interconnections among levels of linguistic structure can account for many of the psycholinguis...

Decision-making in competitive games with incomplete information is a field with many promising applications for AI, both in games (e.g. poker) and in real-life settings (e.g. security). The most general game-theoretic framework that can be used model such games is the zero-sum Partially Observable Stochastic Game (zs-POSG). While use of this model enables agents to make rational decisions, rea...