A particular system of brain mechanisms, called the retinoid system, is proposed as the evolutionary adaptation responsible for the existence of subjectivity and our sense of being here in a surrounding 3D world. The structural and dynamic properties of the retinoid system successfully predict a novel conscious experience in which the brain constructs a vivid visual representation of an object ...

The Population Debate W ith around four babies born every minute, Philippine population is expected to hit 84.2 million by the end of the year. Growing at an average of 2.3% annually, the country’s population has increased fourfold since the 1950s. It now ranks 14th in the world in terms of population size and 8th in terms of population density. This phenomenon is seen either as an onus or a gi...

Why do individuals volunteer their time even when recipients receive far less value than the donor’s opportunity cost? Previous models of altruism that focus on the overall impact of a gift cannot rationalize this behavior, despite its prevalence. We develop a model that relaxes this assumption, allowing for differential warm glow depending on the form of the donation. In a series of laboratory...

Charitable Giving as a Gift Exchange: Evidence from a Field Experiment This study reports data from a field experiment that was conducted to investigate the relevance of gift-exchange for charitable giving. Roughly 10,000 solicitation letters were sent to potential donors in the experiment. One third of the letters contained no gift, one third contained a small gift and one third contained a la...

Polyandrous females are expected to discriminate among males through postcopulatory cryptic mate choice. Yet, there is surprisingly little unequivocal evidence for female-mediated cryptic sperm choice. In species in which nuptial gifts facilitate mating, females may gain indirect benefits through preferential storage of sperm from gift-giving males if the gift signals male quality. We tested th...

Two previous surveys used to measure the welfare implications of Christmas gift-giving in the United States have reached opposite conclusions. Joel Waldfogel (1993) finds a welfare reduction of 13 percent or more associated with Christmas giving. Curiously, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway’s (1996) (henceforth, SH) replication of Waldfogel’s survey turns up just the opposite result: a 214-per...

This paper asks whether gift exchange generates externalities for people outside of the bilateral relationship between the gift giver and recipient, and whether the nature of this relationship is affected by social networks. We examine this question in the context of a field experiment in urban Chinese hospital outpatient clinics. We first show that when patients give a small gift, doctors reci...

Executive Summary The Gift Box Packing Cell has been constructed at Cambridge University's Institute for Manufacturing in order to demonstrate JACK-based holonic control and illustrate how a packing environment can be responsive to change. The cell, with its industrial strength hardware, enables a customer to select three Gillette™ personal grooming products (razor, shaving gel, form and deodor...

Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual interaction. We nest our findings in the standard version of the investment game. Our data provide evidence...

We study wrappings of smooth (convex) surfaces by a flat piece of paper or foil. Such wrappings differ from standard mathematical origami because they require infinitely many infinitesimally small folds (“crumpling”) in order to transform the flat sheet into a surface of nonzero curvature. Our goal is to find shapes that wrap a given surface, have small area and small perimeter (for efficient m...