Our understanding of how markets and businesses operate was passed down to us more than a century ago by English economist Alfred Marshall. It is based on the assumption of diminishing returns: products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into limitations so that a predictable equilibrium of prices and market shares is reached. The theory was valid for the bulk-processing, sm...

The past decade has seen great advances in our understanding of the role of noise in gene regulation and the physical limits to signaling in biological networks. Here, we introduce the spectral method for computation of the joint probability distribution over all species in a biological network. The spectral method exploits the natural eigenfunctions of the master equation of birth-death proces...

Engineers dealing with noise reduction in habitations close to transportation traffic or industrial facilities encounter several problems to decrease noise level in rooms at low frequencies. Passive materials and current building construction knowledge enable to avoid noise transmission in habitations at medium and high frequencies and the regulations based on the dBA scale can often be respect...

OBJECTIVE To study the effect of various types of inoculation message treatments on resistance to persuasive and potentially deceptive health- and nutrition-related (HNR) content claims of commercial food advertisers. METHODS A three-phase experiment was conducted among 145 students from a Midwestern U.S. university. Quantitative statistical analyses were used to interpret the results. RESU...

Administrative agencies frequently use guidance documents to set policy broadly and prospectively in areas ranging from Department of Education Title IX enforcement to Food and Drug Administration regulation of direct-to- consumer pharmaceutical advertising. In form, these guidances often closely resemble the policies agencies issue in ordinary notice-and-comment rulemaking. However, guidances ...

This feature explores the operation of individual markets. Patterns of behavior in markets for specifi c goods and services offer lessons about the determinants and effects of supply and demand, market structure, strategic behavior, and government regulation. Suggestions for future columns and comments on past ones should be sent to James R. Hines Jr., Professor of Economics, University of Mich...

Environments for Safety Regulations A common factor in whether regulation is used is the seriousness of the outcome being addressed in terms of human health. For this reason regulation is more common in transportation and the workplace, where the potential for fatal injury is perceived to be relatively great, and less common in the home and in sports environments, where the potential for fatal ...

In preparation of the revised edition of the Air Traffic Noise Act the Federal Environmental Agency formulated targets for aircraft noise control. They were prepared oriented to the Federal Immission Control Act. The assessment periods were chosen analogously to the regulations on other traffic noise sources (rail traffic, road traffic). The control targets cover the following affected areas * ...