Evolutionary Concept, Genetic Algorithm and Exhibition Contract in Movie Industry

The paper is about application of evolutionary concept, particularly the application of natural selection process, to the study of movie industry. The importance of the application is that it allows for the heterogeneity and interdependency of market agents in analyzing the economic choice decision. This complexity always presents an obstacle to the study of market behavior, especially when one has to take into account the constant reinforcing effects among the variables, which often renders the problem elusive. The paper intends to explain the economic process, particularly the evolution of exhibition contract, taking into account this complexity through the use of evolutionary concept.Evolutionary selection; opportunity costs; learning and sharing rule

Learning to be Biased

We simulate societal opinion dynamics when there is confirmation bias in information gathering and spread. If decision making is influenced by confirmation bias, the agent puts more weight on positive information to confirm hypothesis or reservation in the learning process, which renders selectivity in information gathering. If the utility discovered post purchase is low, it is externalized rather than internalized (i.e., self blame) for the selectivity of information. This causes the agent to outweigh the negative information. These two mechanisms are simulated to investigate the societal opinion dynamics and explain behavioral patterns such as overconfidence, stickiness of response and ``success breeds success" phenomenon.Confirmation bias; Opinion percolation and convergence; Selectivity in information search; Hypothesis testing

Inconsistency of fairness evaluation in simulated labot market.

Reciprocal behavior was often explained by perception of fairness derived from either agents’ intention or distributional outcome. In this paper, we demonstrated that fairness perception depended on the evaluability of the partner’s type. We conducted experiments to investigate how workers formed fairness perception on the employers. We found inconsistency in fairness evaluation in the two simulated worker-employer relations; workers derived fairness by comparing own wage with market wage in a one shot interaction, but workers derived fairness based on current and previous wage when interacting with same employer. The reversal of fairness perception suggested the role of evaluability of partners’ attribute in effort decision among workers.Preference reversal; reciprocity; gift exchange; evaluability hypothesis;experiment.

Viral hijacking of cellular metabolism.

This review discusses the current state of the viral metabolism field and gaps in knowledge that will be important for future studies to investigate. We discuss metabolic rewiring caused by viruses, the influence of oncogenic viruses on host cell metabolism, and the use of viruses as guides to identify critical metabolic nodes for cancer anabolism. We also discuss the need for more mechanistic studies identifying viral proteins responsible for metabolic hijacking and for in vivo studies of viral-induced metabolic rewiring. Improved technologies for detailed metabolic measurements and genetic manipulation will lead to important discoveries over the next decade

Pre-play communication in Cournot competition: An experiment with students and managers

This study investigates the impact of pre-play communication on the outcomes in Cournot duopoly and triopoly experiments, using both students and managers as subjects. Communication is implemented by two different devices, a 'standardized-communication' and a free-communication device. We find that the effect of communication on collusion is larger in duopoly than in triopoly. Moreover, managers behave in a similar way under the two communication devices, while students are more influenced by the free-communication than by the standardized-communication device. In addition, managers select lower aggregate quantities than students, and communication enhances the difference between the subject pools in duopoly but reduces this difference in triopoly. Inspecting individual behavior, in all treatments the output adjustment is significantly correlated with the previous round's best response strategy. In the treatments with communication, the effect of imitation becomes larger and crowds out the effect of myopic best response. Finally, in all treatments duopoly results in more collusion than triopoly. --artefactual field experiment,subject pools,Cournot oligopoly,managers,cheap talk

Social information landscapes: automated mapping of large multimodal, longitudinal social networks

Purpose – This article presents a Big Data solution as a methodological approach to the automated collection, cleaning, collation and mapping of multimodal, longitudinal datasets from social media. The article constructs Social Information Landscapes. Design/methodology/approach – The research presented here adopts a Big Data methodological approach for mapping user-generated contents in social media. The methodology and algorithms presented are generic, and can be applied to diverse types of social media or user-generated contents involving user interactions, such as within blogs, comments in product pages and other forms of media, so long as a formal data structure proposed here can be constructed. Findings – The limited presentation of the sequential nature of content listings within social media and Web 2.0 pages, as viewed on Web browsers or on mobile devices, do not necessarily reveal nor make obvious an unknown nature of the medium; that every participant, from content producers, to consumers, to followers and subscribers, including the contents they produce or subscribed to, are intrinsically connected in a hidden but massive network. Such networks when mapped, could be quantitatively analysed using social network analysis (e.g., centralities), and the semantics and sentiments could equally reveal valuable information with appropriate analytics. Yet that which is difficult is the traditional approach of collecting, cleaning, collating and mapping such datasets into a sufficiently large sample of data that could yield important insights into the community structure and the directional, and polarity of interaction on diverse topics. This research solves this particular strand of problem. Research limitations/implications – The automated mapping of extremely large networks involving hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, over a long period of time could possibly assist in the proving or even disproving of theories. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the feasibility of using automated approaches for acquiring massive, connected datasets for academic inquiry in the social sciences. Practical implications – The methods presented in this article, and the Big Data architecture presented here have great practical values to individuals and institutions which have low budgets. The software-hardward integrated architecture uses open source software, and the social information landscapes mapping algorithms are not difficult to implement. Originality/value – The majority of research in the literatures uses traditional approach for collecting social networks data. The traditional approach is slow, tedious and does not yield a large enough sample for the data to be significant for analysis. Whilst traditional approach collects only a small percentage of data, the original methods presented could possibility collect entire datasets in social media due to its scalability and automated mapping techniques

Individual tradable permit market and traffic congestion: An experimental study

This paper investigates the potential of an individual tradable permit system in an experimental two-sided repeated double auction market to overcome over-consumption through road demand management. The evaluation of this system shows that traders exhibit strong dependence on reservation price and there are significant transfers of permit from low value users to high value users. During peak hours, the permit price increases owing to high demand, so the cost of using the road is high during congestion. This creates incentive for low value drivers to postpone their trips and resell permits in the peak hours to gain profit. The results show the delayer pays principle, in which drivers who value highly have to pay drivers who are willing to stay off the road during peak hours.: Individual tradable permit, Congestion, High value and low value drivers, Allocative efficiency

Evolutionary Concept, Genetic Algorithm and Exhibition Contract in Movie Industry

The paper is about application of evolutionary concept, particularly the application of natural selection process, to the study of movie industry. The importance of the application is that it allows for the heterogeneity and interdependency of market agents in analyzing the economic choice decision. This complexity always presents an obstacle to the study of market behavior, especially when one has to take into account the constant reinforcing effects among the variables, which often renders the problem elusive. The paper intends to explain the economic process, taking into account this complexity through the use of evolutionary concept.Evolutionary selection; opportunity costs; learning and sharing rule

Enzymatic Hydrolysis of Sago Starch for the Production of Maltodextrins

Maltodextrin is a partial starch hydrolysis product used widely in food. It has been produced from corn, tapioca and potato starches. This project was designed to study the production of maltodextrin from refined sago starch and to characterise the maltodextrins produced. The refined sago starch used was obtained from different sago factories and labelled as Bag A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I. Studies carried out showed that there were variations in the quality of the starch of different bags. The moisture content of the starch varied from 10.05 to 15.40% (w/w) while the ash and crude fibre contents were 0. 1 1 0 to 0.930 % (w/w) and 0.040 to 0.560% (w/w) respectively. The sago starch showed greyish colour with Hunter Lab L values of 87.70 to 90.17 and pH values of 4.77 to 7.58. Particle size analysis showed that more than 99.3% (w/w) of the starch passed through the 125 urn pore size sieve. The peak gelatinisation viscosity of the starch varied between 458 to 680 BU. The sago starch showed a common pasting temperature of 74°C and an extremely low level of protein of less than 0.010% w/w. The measurement of the degree of starch damage showed that sago starch of Bags D, E, F and G were undamaged, while starch of the remaining bags had damage of up to 8% w/w. The undamaged sago starch was of two types: the high, and the low viscosity starch with peak gelatinisation viscosities of about 680 BU and 485 BU respectively. Enzymatic susceptibility studies showed that undamaged sago starch was relatively unsusceptible to alpha-amylases Termamyl 120L and BAN 240L. The degrees of hydrolysis achieved after prolonged incubation for 12 hours at 60°C were 8.6 to 12.1% w/w, and 1.8 to 2.3% w/w respectively. The raw damaged and the gelatinised undamaged sago starch had increased susceptibilities to these alpha-amylases. The degrees of hydrolysis were 17.5 to 22.1% w/ w, and about 3.0% w/w respectively, for damaged starch, and 88.3% and 76.5% (w/w) respectively, for the gelatinised starch. Viscozyme 120L when used alone (at a dosage of 0.05% w/w) or in combination with either Termamyl 120L or BAN 240L (at a dosage of 0.10% w/w) had the ability of reducing the viscosity of gelatinised sago starch. It was unable to hydrolyse either the raw or gelatinised starch. Damaged sago starch when used for enzymatic hydrolysis (by Termamyl 120L) produced unstable low DE syrups which retrograded on cooling. Sago starch with high crude fibre content produced low DE syrups that were difficult to filter. Both Termamyl 120L and BAN 240L were found to be suitable for the production of maltodextrin from sago starch. A starch concentration of 20% (w/v) was suitable for hydrolysis at pH 5.5 to pH 6.5. Optimum Termamyl 120L dosages were 0.08 to 0.10% (w/w) for the production of DE 6 to 20 maltodextrins. A dosage of 0.04% (w/w) of BAN 240L was suitable for producing DE 8 to 11 maltodextrins while 0.06% (w/w) and 0.08% (w/w) of the amylase were suitable for producing DE 12 to 15, and DE 16 to 20 maltodextrins respectively