The absent-minded driver’s problem illustrates that probabilistic strategies can give higher pay-offs than deterministic ones. We show that there are strategies using quantum entangled states that give even higher pay-offs, both for the original problem and for the generalized version with an arbitrary number of intersections and any possible set of pay-offs.

When a downstream producer enters backward into the input market, a “helping the rivals” effect exists: such entry hurts the firm’s downstream business as it increases upstream competition and thus reduces the input price for rival downstream firms. This negative externality prevents the newly-created upstream unit from expanding. A spin-off enables the firm to credibly expand in the input mark...

industrialising Britain of Darwin's day seemed a rather Malthusian one — less than half the children born in Liverpool in the mid-nineteenth century survived to the age of five, and overall life expectancy in the big cities was in the 30s, he said. " Today, the extraordinary and still accelerating growth of scientific understanding over the subsequent 150 years and its application to human heal...

Trade-offs among functional traits are essential for explaining community structure and species coexistence. While two-way trade-offs have been investigated in many systems, higher-dimensional trade-offs remain largely hypothetical. Here we demonstrate a three-way trade-off between cell size and competitive abilities for nitrogen and phosphorus in marine and freshwater phytoplankton. At a given...

Behavioral ecology (Krebs 1987) has a rich tradition of calling tradeoffs a cost-benefit. We can synonymize cost-benefit analysis with the notion of a life history trade-off introduced in chapter 3, because in some cases even social system trade-offs have been linked to the pleiotropic effects of one gene on two or more traits. As we will see below, in greenbeard dynamics, which arise from thre...

Trade-offs occur frequently within sociotechnical systems and allow the system to maintain its output in the face of the variable performance of its constituent components. Trade-offs also occur between systems that must interact with each other. Some of these intersystemic tradeoffs may threaten the integrity of one or both systems particularly if the allowable magnitude of the trade-off is no...