INTRODUCTION The first step in competitive RT-PCR is the synthesis and purification of the synthetic competitor. This is an RNA molecule designed to be reverse-transcribed and PCR-amplified with the same efficiency as the endogenous transcript of interest. Once the competitor molecule has been prepared, as described in this protocol, competitive PCR can be carried out, as described in Comptetit...

We study how business customers make multi-product purchase decisions and how the distributors who sell those products can make inferences about their demand functions with incomplete information. The problem is that distributors rarely observe a competitor's price directly, and must infer competitor response indirectly from their own observations about customer purchases. In this research we p...

April 2012 Abstract A manufacturer will often limit competition among downstream partners by authorizing only a select group of retailers to carry its product. However, it is not uncommon for authorized retailers to create an additional competitor by diverting units to an unauthorized seller. Prior research proposes that this diversion will not be optimal unless the diverted units are sold in n...

There is little experimental evidence that any non-human species is capable of purposefully attempting to manipulate the psychological states of others deceptively (e.g., manipulating what another sees). We show here that chimpanzees, one of humans' two closest primate relatives, sometimes attempt to actively conceal things from others. Specifically, when competing with a human in three novel t...

McCauley’s is perhaps the most straightforward of the criticisms. He sees some form of reductive accommodation as the relation most likely to develop between propositional-attitude psychology, on the one hand, and the underlying neurosciences, on the other. In support of this expectation, he cites the typical co-evolutionary process described by Patricia S. Churchland, wherein theories at adjac...

In light of the growing role social media marketing in success businesses and its low adoption rate among small medium enterprises (SMEs), this study aims to identify determinants SMEs’ by considering competitive industry as a moderator. Data were collected from 214 SMEs Malaysia. Unlike extant literature, proposed dual-stage analysis involving partial least squares (PLS) technique artificial i...

The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the food supply chains (FSC) can address unique challenges safety, quality and wastage by improving transparency traceability. However, technology literature FSC is still infancy stage, meaning little known about critical success factors (CSFs) that could affect AI FSC. Therefore, this study makes a pioneering attempt examining CSFs influencing Fo...

To examine the role of international competition in outsourcing production decisions, I study the decisions of producers who used the U.S. Overseas Assembly Program (OAP) to conduct assembly operations in developing countries. The evidence, which is based on U.S. OAP imports between 1991 to 2000, shows that production costs and corporate tax policies both shaped production decisions. While incr...

A nonverbal false belief task was administered to children (mean age 5 years) and two great ape species: chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). Because apes typically perform poorly in cooperative contexts, our task was competitive. Two versions were run: in both, a human competitor witnessed an experimenter hide a reward in one of two containers. When the competitor then lef...

In this paper we consider the problem of regulating an open access essential facility. A vertically integrated firm owns an essential input and operates on the downstream market under the roof of a regulatory mechanism. There is a potential entrant in the downstream market. Both competitors use the same essential input to provide the final services to the consumers. The regulator designs a mech...