Weak Dominance Research Articles

Effect of Motion Trajectory on the Lateralization of Auditory Evoked Responses

Processing of acoustic space in the human auditory system implicates the interaction of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In this study, we investigated the influence of the position and motion direction of sound stimuli on the amplitude and latency of N1, P2, MMN, and P3a components of auditory evoked potentials in the left and right brain hemispheres. The data suggest that functional asymmetry of the N1P2 complex and difference waveforms can be described as weak contralateral dominance. Deviants moving from the lateral positions evoked later P3a components than those moving from the midline, which is consistent with the concept of higher localization accuracy in the frontal part of the acoustic space. The motion direction affected the MMN and P3a latency: the centrifugal deviants produced earlier MMN and P3a responses than the centripetal deviants. This could result from a stronger orienting reaction caused by stimuli moving from the center towards the periphery as compared with the opposite direction.

Dominance rank but not body size influences female reproductive success in mountain gorillas.

According to life history theory, natural selection has shaped trade-offs for allocating energy among growth, reproduction and maintenance to maximize individual fitness. In social mammals body size and dominance rank are two key variables believed to influence female reproductive success. However, few studies have examined these variables together, particularly in long-lived species. Previous studies found that female dominance rank correlates with reproductive success in mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei), which is surprising given they have weak dominance relationships and experience seemingly low levels of feeding competition. It is not currently known whether this relationship is primarily driven by a positive correlation between rank and body size. We used the non-invasive parallel laser method to measure two body size variables (back breadth and body length) of 34 wild adult female mountain gorillas, together with long-term dominance and demography data to investigate the interrelationships among body size, dominance rank and two measures of female reproductive success (inter-birth interval N = 29 and infant mortality N = 64). Using linear mixed models, we found no support for body size to be significantly correlated with dominance rank or female reproductive success. Higher-ranking females had significantly shorter inter-birth intervals than lower-ranking ones, but dominance rank was not significantly correlated with infant mortality. Our results suggest that female dominance rank is primarily determined by factors other than linear body dimensions and that high rank provides benefits even in species with weak dominance relationships and abundant year-round food resources. Future studies should focus on the mechanisms behind heterogeneity in female body size in relation to trade-offs in allocating energy to growth, maintenance and lifetime reproductive success.

Communication Via Delay in a Coordination Game

This paper studies an option of delay in coordination games, allowing players to wait and then choose between the risk-dominant and payoff-dominant actions. The delay option enables forward induction whereby a player’s waiting signals an intention to choose the payoff-dominant action later. If players have e-social preferences (they help other players if at no cost to themselves), iterated weak dominance yields an outcome where everyone waits and then chooses the payoff-dominant action if everyone else waited, so that efficient coordination results. Experimental evidence confirms that waiting can signal future play of the payoff-dominant action.

Socializing in experimental streams: crayfish groups exposed to cues, refuges, and day-night conditions

We initiated the use of a replicated, remote-video, artificial stream system to determine the effects of conspecific cue, refuge availability, and day/night conditions on movement, aggression, dominance, downstream preference, and refuge use by the crayfish Procambarus clarkii. In line with previous research, we found that walking on the gravel substrate was greatly increased and refuge use decreased in the dark. Conspecific cue (macerated crayfish filtrate) increased walking, contrary to our prediction but consistent with cue as a signal of food availability or of risk either from cannibalism or from visual predators. Exposure to conspecific cue in the streams resulted in a reduced degree of dominance in subsequent pairwise dominance trials. We developed and implemented a new and broadly applicable way of determining the extent of linearity (consistency of dominance ranks) for incomplete dominance; for our data, this method found a lack of evidence for linear hierarchies in these stream systems. Our results suggest that streams may tend to feature weaker dominance and reduced linearity of social hierarchies, relative to standing-water systems, a hypothesis that requires further testing.

On an Open Question Regarding When Two-Block Pricing Weakly Dominates Two-Part Tariff

Leland and Meyer showed through an example that when the distribution of consumer types is nondegenerate, there exist two-block pricing plans that yield strictly higher producer surplus than the profit maximizing two-part tariff scheme. This led them to pose the following question: does weak dominance (in the sense of profit) rather than strict dominance of two-block pricing over two-part tariff hold only when the distribution of buyer-types is degenerate? This note shows that the answer to this question is, No: even when the distribution of consumer types is continuous, it is possible that the best two-block pricing scheme performs no better than the best two-part tariff. JEL Classification: D4

The Equivalence of the Minimal Dominant Set and the Myopic Stable Set for Coalition Function Form Games

In cooperative games, the coalition structure core is, despite its potential emptiness, one of the most popular solutions. While it is a fundamentally static concept, the consideration of a sequential extension of the underlying dominance correspondence gave rise to a selection of non-empty generalizations. Among these, the payoff-equivalence minimal dominant set and the myopic stable set are defined by a similar set of conditions. We identify some problems with the payoff-equivalence minimal dominant set and propose an appropriate reformulation called the minimal dominant set. We show that replacing asymptotic external stability by sequential weak dominance leaves the myopic stable set unaffected. The myopic stable set is therefore equivalent to the minimal dominant set.

Weak belief and permissibility

We provide epistemic foundations for permissibility (Brandenburger, 1992), a strategic-form solution concept for finite games which coincides with the Dekel-Fudenberg procedure, i.e., the elimination of all weakly dominated strategies, followed by the iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies. We show that permissibility characterizes the behavioral implications of “cautious rationality and common weak belief of cautious rationality” in the canonical, universal type structure for lexicographic beliefs. For arbitrary type structures, we show that the behavioral implications of these epistemic assumptions are characterized by the solution concept of full weak best response set, a weak dominance analogue of best response set (Pearce, 1984).

Dominance rationality: A unified approach

There are four types of dominance depending on whether domination is strict or weak and whether the dominating strategy is pure or mixed. Letting d vary over these four types of dominance, we say that a player is d-dominance rational when she does not play a strategy that is d-dominated relative to what she knows. For weak dominance by a mixed strategy, Stalnaker (1994) introduced a process of iterative maximal elimination of certain profiles that we call here flaws. We define here, analogously, d-flaws for each type of dominance d, and show that for each d, iterative elimination of d-flaws is order independent. We then show that the characterization of common knowledge of d-dominance rationality is the same for each d. A strategy profile can be played when d-dominance rationality is commonly known if and only if it survives an iterative elimination of d-flaws.

A weak Dominance: Winds of Revolt in Florentine Territory (The second Half of the Fourteenth Century)

This article highlights some of the challenges the nascent Florentine territorial state faced in the second half of the fourteenth century, after it was visited with the Great Plague of 1348. When mercenaries began to cross the territory, and the ruling class found itself unable to handle this kind of emergency, the exurban population turned to forms of self-defence. These initiatives resemble the coeval ones undertaken by the Tuchins in Normandy or those in Languedoc and southern Piedmont.

Iterated elimination procedures

We study the existence and uniqueness (i.e., order independence) of any arbitrary form of iterated elimination procedures in an abstract environment. By allowing for a transfinite elimination, we show a general existence of the iterated elimination procedure. Inspired by the seminal work of Gilboa et al. (OR Lett 9:85–89, 1990), we identify a fairly weak sufficient condition of Monotonicity* for the order independence of iterated elimination procedure. Monotonicity* requires a Monotonicity property along any elimination path. Our approach is applicable to different forms of iterated elimination procedures used in (in)finite games, for example iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies, iterated elimination of weakly dominated strategies, rationalizability, and so on. We introduce a notion of CD* games, which incorporates Jackson’s (Rev Econ Stud 59:757–775, 1992) idea of “boundedness,” and show the iterated elimination procedure is order independent in the class of CD* games. In finite games, we also formulate and show an “outcome” order-independence result suitable for Marx and Swinkles’s (Games Econ Behav 18:219–245, 1997) notion of nice weak dominance.

Nested branch-and-price-and-cut for vehicle routing problems with multiple resource interdependencies

This paper considers vehicle routing problems (VRPs) with multiple resource interdependencies and addresses the development and computational evaluation of an exact branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm for their solution. An interdependency between two resources means that the two resource consumptions influence one another in such a way that a tradeoff exists between them. This impacts the feasibility and/or the cost of a solution.The subproblem in branch-and-price-and-cut procedures for VRPs is very often a variant of the shortest-path problem with resource constraints (SPPRC). For the exact solution of many SPPRC variants, dynamic-programming based labeling algorithms are predominant. The tradeoffs in problems with multiple resource interdependencies, however, render the application of labeling algorithms unpromising. This is because complex data structures for managing the tradeoff curves are necessary and only weak dominance criteria are possible, so that the labeling algorithm becomes almost a pure enumeration. Therefore, we propose to solve also the SPPRC subproblem with branch-and-price-and-cut. This results in a two-level, nested branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm. We analyze different variants of the algorithm to enable the exchange of columns and also rows between the different levels.To demonstrate the computational viability of our approach, we perform computational experiments on a prototypical VRP with time windows, minimal and maximal delivery quantities for each customer, a customer-dependent profit paid for each demand unit delivered, and temporal synchronization constraints between some pairs of customers. In this problem, tradeoffs exist between cost and load and between cost and time.

On Social Welfare Orders Satisfying Anonymity and Strong Equity

This paper studies the nature (representation and construction) of social welfare orders on infinite utility streams, satisfying strong equity and anonymity. We show: 1) there does not exist a social welfare function satisfying the axioms of Anonymity, Monotonicity and Strong Equity for every non-trivial domain Y (i.e., any domain Y containing at least four distinct elements); 2) there exists a social welfare function satisfying the axioms of Anonymity, Strong Equity (and Weak Dominance); 3) any social welfare order satisfying Anonymity and Strong Equity somehow requires the axiom of choice, so in a sense is non-constructive.

Iterated weak dominance and interval-dominance supermodular games

This paper extends Milgrom and Robert's treatment of supermodular games in two ways. It points out that their main characterization result holds under a weaker assumption. It refines the arguments to provide bounds on the set of strategies that survive iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies. I derive the bounds by iterating the best-response correspondence. I give conditions under which they are independent of the order of deletion of dominated strategies. The results have implications for equilibrium selection and dynamic stability in games.

Differential patterns of vocal similarity in tolerant and intolerant macaques

Abstract The investigation of vocal similarity between individuals has provided evidence of the flexibility of communication signals. This study evaluates the impact of group membership, affiliative bonds, kinship and dominance on acoustic similarity in two primate species with different social styles, intolerant rhesus macaques and tolerant Tonkean macaques. We focused on the fundamental frequencies of the contact calls emitted by adult females. Close kinship promoted vocal similarity between individuals in both species, and also group membership in Tonkean macaques, indicating the involvement of experiential and/or genetic factors. In rhesus macaques more similarities were observed between partners with strong or weak dominance asymmetry than between those with medium asymmetry, which again points to the role of experience. No evidence was found that dominance influences vocal similarity in Tonkean macaques. Our results provide additional evidence to the flexibility of vocal signals produced by macaques, and reveal that it is influenced by social style.

One-Sided Weak Dominance Drawing

The Weak Dominance Drawing problem can be defined as follows: given a directed acyclic graph G, find two topological sorts, tX and tY, minimizing the size of the intersection between them. The intersection of two topological sorts is defined as the set of ordered pair of vertices (u,v) such that tX(u)<tX(v) and tY(u)<tY(v). In this work we consider a variation of this problem, that we call One-Sided Weak Dominance Drawing, in which one of the topological sorts is given as input and we must find another topological sort minimizing the intersection set with the given one. This problem has been considered in the literature and its applications include index generation of competitive algorithms for reachability queries on very large graphs. In this paper we formalize the problem, describe one of its applications, show how the problem is currently tackled in the literature, prove that its decision version is NP-complete and determine a primal bound for it as a function of the dimension of G.

The Effect of Open Innovation on Technology Value and Technology Transfer: A Comparative Analysis of the Automotive, Robotics, and Aviation Industries of Korea

With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Korean industrial environment has been rapidly changing. As a result, several industries are facing different innovation conditions, including: the automotive industry, which is a traditional manufacturing industry in Korea; the aerospace industry, which has been vertically integrated, and has been led by a single large company—Korea Aerospace Industries—since Korea went through an economic crisis in the 1990s; and the robotics industry, which is currently emerging. This study used parameters related to patents originating from the automobile, robotics, and aerospace fields. The patents subjected to analysis were those registered in Korea from 2001 to 2014, and included those that were applied for, jointly applied for, or registered by Korean companies. This study analyzed the differences caused by the effect of open innovation in the three industries. According to our results, first, the three industries experienced different effects of open innovation. Second, when large companies controlled a given industry, open innovation either worked a little or did not work at all. According to this research result, the Korean robotics industry, which has a weak dominance of large companies, experienced a strong effect of open innovation, in that joint patent applications led to economic gains from the patents and an increase in technology transfer and technology value. The aerospace industry of Korea, which has the highest dominance of large companies, experienced a slight effect of open innovation, as the effect of joint patent application only improved the technology value. Finally, the automotive industry of Korea had an intermediate level of open innovation, between the aerospace and robotics sectors.

Wind erosion forces and wind direction distribution for assessing the efficiency of shelterbelts in northern China

Abstract The prevailing wind erosion direction (PWED) and wind direction distribution (WDD) exert a significant impact on the protection efficiency of shelterbelts in regions affected by soil wind erosion. In this paper, wind erosion forces, the PWED, the preponderance of wind erosion forces (Rm) in the PWED, and the contrast of wind erosion forces between the PWED and the opposite direction (λ) were calculated based on wind data recorded at 204 weather stations in northern China from 1980 to 2016. The dominance of the PWED, reflected by the combination of Rm and λ, was defined as the WDD. The WDD was divided into four structural patterns: strong dominance of the PWED (Pattern I), strong dominance of both the PWED and its opposite direction (Pattern II), medium dominance of the PWED (Pattern III) and weak dominance of the PWED (Pattern IV). The western region mostly belongs to Pattern I, and in this area, primary shelterbelts perpendicular to the PWED should be strengthened. Local areas in the mountain passes in the northwest Junggar Basin, north Qaidam Basin, northwest Hexi Corridor, and southern part of the plains area in Northeast China belong to Pattern II, and multirow shelterbelts with orientations perpendicular to the PWED must be set up in this region. The east region mainly belongs to Pattern III or Pattern IV; different levels of shelterbelts must be set up, and both primary and secondary shelterbelt construction must be strengthened in this region.

Sighting ocular dominance magnitude varies with test distance

BackgroundOcular dominance can be defined as the preference of an individual for viewing with one eye over the other for particular visual tasks. It is relevant to monovision contact lens wear, cataract surgery and sports vision. Clinically, the measurement of ocular dominance is typically done at an arbitrary distance using a sighting test, such as the hole‐in‐card method that has a binary outcome. We investigated the effect of test distance on ocular dominance measured using a binocular sighting test that provided a continuous measurement of dominance.MethodsTen participants with normal binocular vision took part in this study. Their binocular sighting ocular dominance and phorias were measured at one, two, four, eight and 10 metres. During the dominance tests participants made a binocular alignment judgment and then were asked to indicate the relative alignment of each eye using a visual analogue scale as a reference.ResultsEight participants had strong ocular dominance (five right, three left). For these participants, there was a significant increase in the magnitude of dominance with increasing test distance (p < 0.001). This could not be fully explained by changes in convergence demand. Two participants showed very weak ocular dominance across all test distances (p > 0.05), despite changes in convergence demand.ConclusionWhen ocular dominance is present, its magnitude varies significantly with test distance. This has significant implications for the accurate measurement of ocular dominance in the clinic and may reflect the neural processes that influence eye preference.

Multiple Aggressions Among Nestmates Lead to Weak Dominance Hampering Primitively Eusocial Behaviour in an Orchid Bee

Reproductive conflict expressed as aggression is common in social Hymenoptera. In eusocial species, as in honeybees, several mechanisms alleviate the conflicts and reduce aggressive interactions. Unlike their sister group, the orchid bees do not exhibit eusociality. Instead, most of the species seem to have lost sociality and some species have retained vestigial social behaviour. In the current study we investigated the aggressive interactions of females of Euglossa annectans Dressler through five generations of phylopatry and reuse of the natal nest. Although network analysis indicates that central individuals, those with more interactions, were more commonly the aggressors and others were more commonly the recipients, multiple attacks and several potential dominant female within the nest indicated a labile sociality. This suggests that there is an unstable social hierarchy in the species. Euglossa annectans, despite having overlapping generations, during which several individuals share a nest, there is no division of labour into reproductive and interactions are often competitive. Aggressive behaviours conducted by multiple fertile females were often followed by egg, larvae or pupae replacement.

Revenue comparison of discrete private-value auctions via weak dominance

We employ weak dominance to analyze both first-price and second-price auctions under the discrete private-value setting. We provide a condition under which the expected revenue from second-price auction is higher than that of first-price auction. We also provide implications for large auctions, including the “virtual” revenue equivalence.