Charles Darwin [1,2] handed us a picture of competition as a constructive process responsible for adaptation to the environment, as well as the evolution of striking sexual displays and weapons. Darwin believed that sexual competition promotes adaptation by helping to weed out poor-quality males from the breeding pool and bringing about assortative pairing between high-quality males and females.

BACKGROUND Poor medical care and high fees are two major problems in the world health care system. As a result, health care insurance system reform is a major issue in developing countries, such as China. Governments should take the effect of health care insurance system reform on the competition of hospitals into account when they practice a reform. This article aims to capture the influences ...

Adequate quality and quantity of athletes’ competition day diet is critically important for better performance and optimum recovery. The aim of this study was to evaluate the adequacy of nutrient intake and dietary practices of Sri Lankan national volleyball players during a day of a major competition. Dietary practices of 76 athletes (43 males and 33 females) were surveyed using 24-hour diet...

Does political competition along ethnic lines worsen politician quality? We show that, in a world with incomplete policy commitment, a greater tendency to vote along ethnic lines reduces politician quality even when it does not affect the availability of good candidates and there are no systematic differences in candidate quality across parties. Specifically, ethnic party competition lowers the...

The ICDAR 2021 Time-Quality Binarization Competition assessed the performance of 12 new and 49 other previously published binarization algorithms for scanned document images. Four test sets “real-world” documents with different features were used. For each set, top twenty in quality resulting two-tone images had their average processing time presented, yielding an account complexity.

the effects of above and below-ground competition between chenopodium album and sugar beet (beta vulgaris) on growth, yield and quality of two sugar beet cultivars of morphologically contrasting growth habit have been investigated a factorial experiment (2 × 4) under glass-house conditions in a randomised complete block design with three replications was done. c. album and two sugar beet cultiv...

This paper analyses the design of hospital reimbursement in an industry with imperfect competition, scarcity of labour and socially costly government transfers. We find that hospital competition may increase both quantity and quality of hospital care, and if this is the case prospective payment has an unambigious positive effect on both quantity and quality. Hospitals may produce too little or ...