This monograph is described as an “outgrowth” of a Ph.D. dissertation submitted to the University of Michigan, which seems to be something different than simply a revised form of the original dissertation. I am uncertain who the intended audience is; the book seems to be designed for a more popular audience, on the one hand, since it does not go into depth on a number of points. However, it pre...

We study how norms can solve distributional conflict inside a clan and the efficient coordination of collective action in a conflict with an external enemy. We characterize a fully non-cooperative equilibrium in a finite game in which a self-enforcing norm coordinates the members on efficient collective action and on a peaceful distribution of the returns of collective action. JEL Classificatio...

Background: The primary risk factor for primary-open angle glaucoma (POAG) is increased intraocular pressure (IOP). In POAG patients, the outflow resistance through the trabecular meshwork (TM) is abnormally elevated. One of the important glaucoma-associated pathological changes in the TM is formation of excessive cross-linked actin networks (CLANs). CLANs are web-like polygonal structures foun...

In the Prisoner's Dilemma, two players decide, without communicating, whether to cooperate or defect. The players engage in repeated rounds of the Prisoner's Dilemma in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD), a model of competition and cooperation in social interactions. A genetic algorithm is a search procedure inspired by the mechanisms of biological evolution. In it, a population of solutions...

UNLABELLED Analysis of microarray experiments is complicated by the huge amount of data involved. Searching for groups of co-expressed genes is akin to searching for protein families in a database as, in both cases, small subsets of genes with similar features are to be found within vast quantities of data. CLANS was originally developed to find protein families in large sets of amino acid sequ...

From Facebook groups and online gaming clans, to social movements and terrorist cells, groups of individuals aligned by interest, values or background are of increasing interest to social network researchers (Snow et al., 1980; Zheleva et al., 2009). In particular, understanding the structural and dynamic factors that influence the evolution of these groups remains an open challenge (Palla et a...

Cooperation is the foundation of multi-agent systems, and allows agents to interact to achieve complex goals. In dynamic environments cooperation gives rise to inherent uncertainty since we cannot predict how agents will respond to environmental change. Consequently, agents must have some mechanism for coping with this uncertainty. In particular, agents must manage the risk resulting from inter...

While populations may wax and wane, it is rare for an entire population to be replaced by a completely different set of individuals. We document the large-scale relocation of cultural groups of sperm whale off the Galápagos Islands, in which two sympatric vocal clans were entirely replaced by two different ones. Between 1985 and 1999, whales from two clans (called Regular and Plus-One) defined ...