Two German eye-tracking experiments tested whether top-down expectations interact with acoustically-driven word-recognition processes. Competitor objects with two synonymous names were paired with target objects whose names shared word onsets with either the dominant or the non-dominant name of the competitor. Non-dominant names of competitor objects were either introduced before the test sessi...

Ideal free distribution (IFD) theory has frequently been used to investigate habitat selection when fitness payoffs are frequency-dependent. To date, however, researchers have not considered the possibility that individuals may simultaneously differ in their ability to compete for resources and their susceptibility to predation. Such differences might be expected to occur as a consequence of di...

Territorial animals can be expected to distinguish among the types of competitors and noncompetitors that they encounter on a regular basis, including prospective mates and rivals of their own species, but they may not correctly classify individuals of other species. Closely related species often have similar phenotypes and this can cause confusion when formerly allopatric populations first com...

Listeners' interactions often take place in auditorily challenging conditions. We examined how noise affects phonological competition during spoken word recognition. In a visual-world experiment, which allows us to examine the time-course of recognition, English participants listened to target words in quiet and in noise while they saw four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. candle), an ons...

This work focuses on one of the most critical issues to plague the wireless telecommunications industry today: the loss of a valuable subscriber to a competitor, also defined as churn. Analytical methods and models intrinsic to decision technology and machine learning are here evaluated, in an effort to provide the necessary intelligence to identify and understand troublesome customers in order...

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the practice of studying competitors and competitive environment in support of firm’s strategic decision-making process. Currently, competitors are usually studied from business profile information and reports edited by CI professionals. While being inefficient and expensive in labor and resources, their results are often incomplete and lack objectivity. Some ex...

The relative preference for a target product over a competitor can be increased by providing a third alternative (a "decoy") that is clearly inferior to the target but is not necessarily inferior to the competitor. In 3 experiments, we examined the conditions in which these decoy effects occur. When participants reported their preferences immediately after being exposed to the information about...

In this paper, we formulate a three-species ecological community model consisting of two aphid species (Acyrthosiphon pisum and Megoura viciae) and a specialist parasitoid (Aphidius ervi) that attacks only one of the aphids (A pisum). The model incorporates both density-mediated and trait-mediated host-parasitoid interactions. Our analysis shows that the model possesses much richer and more rea...

Grounded in social facilitation theory, this study compared the impact on exercise intensity of a virtual versus a live competitor, when riding a virtual reality-enhanced stationary bike ("cybercycle"). It was hypothesized that competitiveness would moderate effects. Twenty-three female college students were exposed to three conditions on a cybercycle: solo training, virtual competitor, and liv...

Pricing series reflect multiple decisions (e.g., regular pricing and discounting) often made by multiple decision makers. For example, temporary price reductions (high frequency price changes) can be used to price discriminate in the short run, while regular price adjustments (low frequency price changes) reflect more strategic or long-term goals. It is therefore not implausible that the “react...