Computational Results for Extensive-Form Adversarial Team Games

We provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first computational study of extensive-form adversarial team games. These games are sequential, zero-sum games in which a team of players, sharing the same utility function, faces an adversary. We define three different scenarios according to the communication capabilities of the team. In the first, the teammates can communicate and correlate their actions both before and during the play. In the second, they can only communicate before the play. In the third, no communication is possible at all. We define the most suitable solution concepts, and we study the inefficiency caused by partial or null communication, showing that the inefficiency can be arbitrarily large in the size of the game tree. Furthermore, we study the computational complexity of the equilibrium-finding problem in the three scenarios mentioned above, and we provide, for each of the three scenarios, an exact algorithm. Finally, we empirically evaluate the scalability of the algorithms in random games and the inefficiency caused by partial or null communication

Adolescents and Young Adults in Latin America, Critical Decisions at a Critical Age: Young Adult Labor Market Experience

This study explores and analyzes the labor market experience of young adults in 18 Latin American countries. For men, the period of young adulthood (18-25 years of age) was found to be one of smooth convergence towards patterns associated with full adulthood. Females show more complex and less clear-cut trajectories, which seem to be affected by entrance into motherhood. Educational attainment shapes the labor market experience of young adults, regardless of gender: the more educated postpone entry into the market, and more educated women display higher participation rates as they reach late young adulthood. Also, during young adulthood, the more educated display higher unemployment rates, possibly because they are newer in the market, but their rate of participation in the informal sector of the economy is lower. Female labor market experience was found to be affected by motherhood. In many countries women with lower levels of education leave the labor market during young adulthood, while women with higher levels of education postpone such exits and are also less likely to leave. Finally, young Latin American adults with college education were found to experience rapid labor market absorption, featuring swift entry into the formal sector, high participation rates and low and rapidly decreasing unemployment rates. Earnings equations show that education, experience and gender have significant and positive effects on the earnings of young adults. In general, returns from education increase with age and educational level, with the sharpest marginal change occurring in early young adulthood. Return for education and experience of young adults tend to be close to those obtained by prime age adults, although in the case of experience the returns obtained by young adults tend to be larger. In general, formal education has a consistently larger effect than experience. Although the previous findings hold for young adults in almost all countries included in the study, it is important to note that the individual countries results show large variation in the levels of all coefficients (education, experience and gender) and among age groups.

Bandgap widening by disorder in rainbow metamaterials

Stubbed plates, i.e., thin elastic sheets endowed with pillar-like resonators, display subwavelength, locally-resonant bandgaps that are primarily controlled by the intrinsic resonance properties of the pillars. In this work, we experimentally study the bandgap response of a tunable heterogeneous plate endowed with reconfigurable families of pillars. We demonstrate that, under certain circumstances, both the spectrum of resonant frequencies of the pillars and their spatial arrangement influence the filtering characteristics of the system. Specifically, both spatially graded and disordered arrangements result in bandgap widening. Moreover, the spectral range over which attenuation is achieved with random arrangements is on average wider than the one observed with graded configurations