It is now widely accepted that biochemical reaction networks can perform computations. Examples are kinetic proof reading, gene regulation, or signalling networks. For many of these systems it was found that their computational performance is limited by a trade-off between the metabolic cost, the speed and the accuracy of the computation. In order to gain insight into the origins of these trade...

A qualitative axiomatization of a generalization of expected utility theory is given in which the expected value of simple gambles is not necessarily the product of subjective probability and utility. Representation and uniqueness theorems for these generalized structures are derived for both Archimedean and nonarchimedean cases. It is also shown that a simple condition called distributivity is...

The idea that developing countries face a trade-off between poverty and inequality has had considerable influence on thinking about development policy. The experience of developing countries in the 1990s does not, however, reveal any sign of a systematic trade-off between measures of absolute poverty and relative inequality. Indeed, falling inequality tends to come with falling poverty incidenc...

Drought escape and dehydration avoidance represent alternative strategies for drought adaptation in annual crops. The mechanisms underlying these two strategies are reported to have a negative correlation, suggesting a trade-off. We conducted a quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis of flowering time and root mass, traits representing each strategy, in Brassica napus to understand if a trade-o...

• Objective: To ascertain whether the utilities assigned by patients to possible complications of prostate cancer treatment predict their actual treatment choice. • Design: Prospective cohort series. • Setting: A university hospital, a Veterans Administration hospital, and a large county hospital. • Participants: 950 men being evaluated for the presence of prostate cancer. • Outcome measures: T...

Living cells deploy many resources to sense their environments, including receptors, downstream signaling molecules, time and fuel. However, it is not known which resources fundamentally limit the precision of sensing, like weak links in a chain, and which can compensate each other, leading to trade-offs between them. We show by modeling that in equilibrium systems the precision is limited by t...