When attempting to portray the attractiveness of a brand vis-à-vis its competitors, an ad may make global claims about superiority or specific claims about one or more attributes. A special case of latter is the piecemeal ad in which the advertised brand is compared to a competitor on one attribute, a different competitor on a second attribute, another competitor on a third attribute, and so on...

Two experiments investigated whether the choice of anaphoric expression is affected by the presence of an addressee. Following a context sentence and visual scene, participants described a target scene that required anaphoric reference. They described the scene either to an addressee (Experiment 1) or without an addressee (Experiment 2). When an addressee was present in the task, participants u...

Existing vanilla algorithms for online linear optimization have O((ηR(u) + 1/η) √ T ) regret with respect to any competitor u, whereR(u) is a 1-strongly convex regularizer and η > 0 is a tuning parameter of the algorithm. For certain decision sets and regularizers, the so-called parameter-free algorithms have Õ( √ R(u)T ) regret with respect to any competitor u. Vanilla algorithm can achieve th...

Studies of phenotypic plasticity frequently demonstrate functional trade-offs between alternative phenotypes by documenting environment-specific costs and benefits. However, the functional mechanisms underlying these trade-offs are often unknown. For example, predator-induced traits typically provide superior predator resistance but slower growth, while competitor-induced traits provide better ...

Environments are patchy in not only abiotic factors but also biotic ones. Many studies have examined effects of spatial heterogeneity in abiotic factors such as light, water and nutrients on the growth of clonal plants, but few have tested those in biotic factors. We conducted a greenhouse experiment to examine how patchy distributions of competitors affect the growth of a rhizomatous wetland p...

BACKGROUND A rural pharmacy initiative (RPI) designed to increase access to medicines in rural Kyrgyzstan created a network of 12 pharmacies using a revolving drug fund mechanism in 12 villages where no pharmacies previously existed. The objective of this study was to determine if the establishment of the RPI resulted in the unforeseen benefit of triggering medicine price competition in pre-exi...