Written contracts between governments and state enterprises have been widely used in World Bank projects since the first Bank operation supporting performance contracts, a 1975 operation in Senegal. A Bank survey of developing countries found 565 such contracts in thirty-two countries, and another 103,000 in China as of June 1994 (World Bank 1995). Although these performance contracts go by dif...

This paper gives a complete characterization of neutrally stable strategies for sender–receiver games in the style of Lewis, or Nowak and Krakauer [Lewis, D., 1969. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA; Nowak, M., Krakauer, D., 1999. The evolution of language. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 96, 8028–8033]. Due to the dynamic implications of neutral stability, the rep...

................................................................................................................ 122 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 123 Materials and methods .......................................................................................... 124 Results .................................

Understanding biomolecular systems is important both for the analysis of naturally occurring systems as well as for the design of new ones. However, mathematical tools for analysis of such complex systems are generally lacking. Here, we present an application of the method of sinusoidal-input describing function for the analysis of such a system. Using this technique, we approximate the input-o...

David Lewis famously pioneered a game-theoretic approach in which meaning is possible in signaling games if the agents can converge to a signaling system. In a signaling system success is guaranteed for the receivers reliably infer the correct state of the world from the message sent by the sender. Yet how likely are such outcomes? We employ a series of laboratory experiments to address this qu...

As ATM becomes widely accepted as the communication standard for high speed networks, the signaling system structure and protocols that support ATM become more and more important. To support existing, future and unknown applications, the signaling system has to be very exible and e cient. In this paper we de ne the signaling problem, present several possible signaling system structures, compare...

At first glance, a 100-year-old tree and a bacterium do not have much in common. However, both plants and bacteria face a similar problem: They are confined to their environment and have to endure and adapt to a broad array of environmental conditions. To manage this complex task, prokaryotic organisms rely on the two-component signaling system, which is involved in such diverse processes as ch...

diabetic retinopathy is the lead among causes of blindness in north america. glucose-induced endothelial injury is the most important cause of diabetic retinopathy and other vascular complications. extracellular signal-regulated kinase 5 (erk5), also known as big mitogen-activated protein kinase 1 (bmk1), is a member of mitogen-activated protein kinases (mapk) family. physiologically, it is cri...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative condition which has the second largest incidence rate among all other neurodegenerative disorders barring Alzheimer's disease (AD). Currently there is no cure and researchers continue to probe the therapeutic prospect in cell cultures and animal models of PD. Out of several factors contributing to PD prognosis, the role of p38 MAPKs (mitog...