This paper considers the welfare impacts of a range of franchising regimes for congestible highways. For a single road in isolation, it is shown that a competitive auction with the level of road use as the decision criterion produces the socially optimal road (in terms of capacity and toll level) as the equilibrium outcome, provided constant returns to scale characterize highway operations. The...

Socially isolated individuals face elevated rates of illness and death. Conventional measures of social connectedness reflect an individual's perceived network and can be subject to bias and variation in reporting. In this study of a large human social network, we find that greater indegree, a sociocentric measure of friendship and familial ties identified by a subject's social connections rath...

Food allergy is one of the important health problems, and countermeasures are socially required. We have been undertaking studies on wheat allergens and their epitopes, and have developed a method for producing hypoallergenic wheat flour by enzymatic modification. The hypoallergenic products are now provided to patients. More noteworthy, by taking hypoallergenic cupcakes over a long period, mor...

OBJECTIVES We investigated the relationship between friendships and suicidality among male and female adolescents. METHODS We analyzed friendship data on 13,465 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health to explore the relationship between friendship and suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. We controlled for known factors associated with suicidality. RESULTS H...

Virtual environments such as training simulators and video games do an impressive job at modeling the physical dynamics of synthetic worlds but fall short when modeling the social dynamics of anything but the most impoverished human encounters. Yet the social dimension is at least as important as good graphics for creating an engaging game or effective training tool. Commercial flight simulator...

Mining for Bitcoins is a high-risk high-reward activity. Miners, seeking to reduce their variance and earn steadier rewards, collaborate in so-called pooling strategies where they jointly mine for Bitcoins. Whenever some pool participant is successful, the earned rewards are appropriately split among all pool participants. Currently a dozen of different pooling strategies (i.e., methods for dis...

We propose a model of prediction markets where participants are biased according to their social relationships. We relax the standard assumption of complete rationality and adopt an arguably more realistic model where agents are disproportionally influenced by their neighbors in a social network. We conduct extensive agent-based simulations of our model. We find that prices in prediction market...

In agent research, emergent narrative aims for practical solutions to the narrative paradox problem in both drama and interactive scenarios. At the same time, organisational frameworks can be used in games to provide flexibility, adaptiveness, or social-awareness. In this paper, we propose an extension of our cOncienS framework to support emergent narrative in games with two objectives: 1) prov...