Instead of assuming that all actors are equally likely to clash, and that they do so independently of previous clashes, rivalry analysis can focus on the small number of feuding dyads that cause much of the trouble in the international system. But the value added of this approach will hinge in part on how rivalries are identified. Rivalry dyads are usually identified by satisfying thresholds in the frequency of militarized disputes occurring within some prespecified interval of time. But this approach implies a number of analytical problems including the possibility that rivalry analyses are simply being restricted to a device for distinguishing between states that engage in frequent and infrequent conflict. An alternative approach defines rivalry as a perceptual categorizing process in which actors identify which states are sufficiently threatening competitors to qualify as enemies. A systematic approach to identifying these strategic rivalries is elaborated. The outcome, 174 rivalries in existence between 1816 and 1999 are named and compared to the rivalry identification lists produced by three dispute density approaches. The point of the comparison is not necessarily to assert the superiority of one approach over others as it is to highlight the very real costs and benefits associated with different operational assumptions. The question must also be raised whether all approaches are equally focused on what we customarily mean by rivalries. Moreover, in the absence of a consensus on basic concepts and measures, rivalry findings will be anything but additive even if the subfield continues to be monopolized by largely divergent dispute density approaches.
Abstract This research tested the evolutionary psychological hypothesis that men and women would be most distressed about threats from rivals who surpass them on sex‐linked components of mate value. Six predictions were tested in samples from three cultures, the United States ( N = 208), the Netherlands ( N = 349), and Korea ( N = 174). Five predictions were supported in all three cultures. Korean, Dutch, and American men, more than corresponding women, report greater distress when a rival surpasses them on financial prospects, job prospects, and physical strength. Korean, Dutch, and American women, in contrast, report greater distress when a rival surpasses them on facial and bodily attractiveness. The cultures differed on some variables. Korean women and men, for example, differed from Americans and Dutch in reporting more distress over rivals who had better financial prospects, better job prospects, and higher status and prestige. Americans exceeded Koreans in reporting distress when rivals had more attractive faces and bodies, whereas the Dutch exceeded the other cultures in reporting more distress when rivals had a better sense of humor. Discussion focuses on possible proximate psychological mechanisms underlying distress over rivals and the theoretical importance of intrasexual competition.
This research advances the construct of competitor acumen, or the extent to which a focal firm's assessment of a given rival's prioritization of its competitors reflects the rival's own view. We propose that the way a firm is embedded within market-engagement relationships shapes the firm's competitor acumen. We test our propositions using data collected from the U.S. airline industry and highlight the significance of competitor acumen by showing its impact on a focal firm's market share gain relative to a rival. The findings contribute to competitive dynamics research and suggest a new approach to competitor analysis based on rival-centric perceptions.
Rival Enlightenments, first published in 2001, is a major reinterpretation of early modern German intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophical doctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historical circumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacralization. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius and the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intellectual cultures or paideiai, thereby challenging all histories premised on Kant's supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field. This study reveals the extraordinary historical self-consciousness of the civil philosophers, who repudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual formation of those administering desacralized territorial states. The book argues that the marginalization of civil philosophy in post-Kantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuation of the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combining careful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic, Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and historians alike.
Social comparison theories typically imply a comparable degree of competition between commensurate rivals who are competing on a mutually important dimension. However, the present analysis reveals that the degree of competition between such rivals depends on their proximity to a meaningful standard. Studies 1 to 3 test the prediction that individuals become more competitive and less willing to maximize profitable joint gains when they and their commensurate rivals are highly ranked (e.g., #2 vs. #3) than when they are not (e.g., #202 vs. #203). Studies 4 to 6 then generalize these findings, showing that the degree of competition also increases in the proximity of other meaningful standards, such as the bottom of a ranking scale or a qualitative threshold in the middle of a scale. Studies 7 and 8 further examine the psychological processes underlying this phenomenon and reveal that proximity to a standard exerts a direct impact on the basic unidirectional drive upward, beyond the established effects of commensurability and dimension relevance.
The primate visual system achieves remarkable visual object recognition performance even in brief presentations, and under changes to object exemplar, geometric transformations, and background variation (a.k.a. core visual object recognition). This remarkable performance is mediated by the representation formed in inferior temporal (IT) cortex. In parallel, recent advances in machine learning have led to ever higher performing models of object recognition using artificial deep neural networks (DNNs). It remains unclear, however, whether the representational performance of DNNs rivals that of the brain. To accurately produce such a comparison, a major difficulty has been a unifying metric that accounts for experimental limitations, such as the amount of noise, the number of neural recording sites, and the number of trials, and computational limitations, such as the complexity of the decoding classifier and the number of classifier training examples. In this work, we perform a direct comparison that corrects for these experimental limitations and computational considerations. As part of our methodology, we propose an extension of "kernel analysis" that measures the generalization accuracy as a function of representational complexity. Our evaluations show that, unlike previous bio-inspired models, the latest DNNs rival the representational performance of IT cortex on this visual object recognition task. Furthermore, we show that models that perform well on measures of representational performance also perform well on measures of representational similarity to IT, and on measures of predicting individual IT multi-unit responses. Whether these DNNs rely on computational mechanisms similar to the primate visual system is yet to be determined, but, unlike all previous bio-inspired models, that possibility cannot be ruled out merely on representational performance grounds.
Abstract RRC analysis principally focuses on a market with a dominant firm that is assumed to have significant market power, independent of any cost-raising strategies. The fundamental insight of the RRC theory is that increases in rivals’ marginal costs will lead the rivals to reduce their output relative to an initial equilibrium level. The dominant firm also experiences an increase in marginal cost that, other things equal, reduces its profits. RRC may not be profitable and, as a matter of economic theory, the net consumer-welfare effects of profitable cost-raising strategies are ambiguous. It is important to understand this theoretical ambiguity, particularly when evaluating the potential for vertical mergers to be anticompetitive.
It is shown that frequency sensitive competitive learning (FSCL), one version of the recently improved competitive learning (CL) algorithms, significantly deteriorates in performance when the number of units is inappropriately selected. An algorithm called rival penalized competitive learning (RPCL) is proposed. In this algorithm, not only is the winner unit modified to adapt to the input for each input, but its rival (the 2nd winner) is delearned by a smaller learning rate. RPCL can be regarded as an unsupervised extension of Kohonen's supervised LVQ2. RPCL has the ability to automatically allocate an appropriate number of units for an input data set. The experimental results show that RPCL outperforms FSCL when used for unsupervised classification, for training a radial basis function (RBF) network, and for curve detection in digital images.
This paper presents an unsupervised learning algorithm for sense disambiguation that, when trained on unannotated English text, rivals the performance of supervised techniques that require time-consuming hand annotations. The algorithm is based on two powerful constraints -that words tend to have one sense per discourse and one sense per collocation -exploited in an iterative bootstrapping procedure. Tested accuracy exceeds 96%.
Antibodies, the most popular class of molecules providing molecular recognition needs for a wide range of applications, have been around for more than three decades. As a result, antibodies have made substantial contributions toward the advancement of diagnostic assays and have become indispensable in most diagnostic tests that are used routinely in clinics today. The development of the systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) process, however, made possible the isolation of oligonucleotide sequences with the capacity to recognize virtually any class of target molecules with high affinity and specificity. These oligonucleotide sequences, referred to as "aptamers", are beginning to emerge as a class of molecules that rival antibodies in both therapeutic and diagnostic applications. Aptamers are different from antibodies, yet they mimic properties of antibodies in a variety of diagnostic formats. The demand for diagnostic assays to assist in the management of existing and emerging diseases is increasing, and aptamers could potentially fulfill molecular recognition needs in those assays. Compared with the bellwether antibody technology, aptamer research is still in its infancy, but it is progressing at a fast pace. The potential of aptamers may be realized in the near future in the form of aptamer-based diagnostic products in the market. In such products, aptamers may play a key role either in conjunction with, or in place of, antibodies. It is also likely that existing diagnostic formats may change according to the need to better harness the unique properties of aptamers.
September 01 2000 Information and Persuasion: Rivals or Partners? Katherine McCoy Katherine McCoy Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Katherine McCoy Online ISSN: 1531-4790 Print ISSN: 0747-9360 © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2000 Design Issues (2000) 16 (3): 80–83. https://doi.org/10.1162/07479360052053342 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Katherine McCoy; Information and Persuasion: Rivals or Partners?. Design Issues 2000; 16 (3): 80–83. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/07479360052053342 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsDesign Issues Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
This paper investigates the effects on product innovation of firms' search to innovate, taking into account how a firm's search relates to that of its competitors. Drawing on organizational learning theory, we hypothesize that search timing relative to competitors matters and test two seemingly contradictory views: that competitors take away the exclusivity of search and therefore suppress innovation or, in contrast, sharpen and validate the focal firm's search and thus promote innovation. Our analysis of 15 years of longitudinal data on 124 Japanese, European, and U.S. industrial automation organizations reconciles these views. Results show that firms introduce more new products if they search after their competitors do, and they introduce more innovative new products if they search ahead of their competitors. The most innovative firms combine these two approaches, bridging their own and their rivals' hitherto isolated clusters of knowledge, but avoid engaging in learning contests in which they search at the same time as their rivals. The key insight for innovating firms, then, is not necessarily to strive to perform as well as possible in absolute terms, but to be different from the competition.
To survive and prosper in today's highly competitive environment, firms are increasingly engaging in cooperative alliances with their rivals. However, the impact of these competitor alliances on financial performance is largely unknown. This research examines this issue. Using both survey and archival data, the authors conduct two studies that reveal that the intensity of a firm's alliances with its competitors has a curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) influence on return on equity. In addition, the authors find that a firm's competitor orientation, as embodied in its strategies and objectives, can strengthen or weaken this curvilinear effect. Overall, these findings indicate that both competition and cooperation have dark sides that a firm must carefully manage when working with rivals. © 2007, American Marketing Association.
In most statistical literature on the design of experiments it is assumed that the correct form of the mathematical model is known and the problem is to select the experimental conditions so that some criterion is satisfied, for example, the parameters are estimated with maximum precision. Such an approach, however, ignores one important question that often confronts experimenters who, instead of having only one model known to be correct, have a number of rival candidate models to consider. Such situations can arise, for example, at the outset of investigations on the kinetics of solid-catalyzed gas reactions in chemical engineering. Often the immediate question in these circumstances is: how should experiments be planned so that the inadequate models can be detected and hence eliminated most eliiciently? In this paper a sequential design procedure is proposed for discriminating between two rival models. The basic idea is to select for the next experimental point that at which the models differ the most. Examples are included which illustrate the application of this procedure to problems in chemical kinetics.
The conclusions of the Bertrand model of competition are substantially altered by the presence of asymmetric information about rivals' costs. Asymmetric information eliminates the discontinuity in the Bertrand model and significantly alters the properties of the market equilibrium. In the Bertrand-Nash equilibrium when rivals' costs are unknown, firms price above marginal cost and have positive expected profit. The analysis is extended to franchise competition. The market equilibrium is sensitive to market structure and yields incentives for entry. Copyright 1995 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
ABSTRACT The article reviews the current study of the European Union (EU), where a new agenda is emerging under the umbrella of ‘new governance’. Despite its eclecticism, this agenda argues that the EU is not a state, but is a unique system of non-hierarchical, regulatory and deliberative governance. This agenda also conceptualizes the EU as sui generis, explains its development primarily by (new) institutional theory, and suggests that legitimacy is guaranteed through transparent, pareto-efficient and consensual outputs. Nevertheless, this agenda is open to criticism on empirical, methodological, theoretical and normative levels. Such a dialectic suggests a new duality in the study of the EU: between the new governance approach, and a less developed rival agenda, which treats EU politics and government as not inherently unique, compares the EU to other political systems, explains outcomes through rational strategic action, and suggests that legitimacy can be guaranteed through classic democratic competition over inputs.
Past research shows that luxury products can function to boost self-esteem, express identity, and signal status. We propose that luxury products also have important signaling functions in relationships. Whereas men use conspicuous luxury products to attract mates, women use such products to deter female rivals. Drawing on both evolutionary and cultural perspectives, five experiments investigated how women's luxury products function as a signaling system directed at other women who pose threats to their romantic relationships. Findings showed that activating a motive to guard one's mate triggered women to seek and display lavish possessions. Additional studies revealed that women use pricey possessions to signal that their romantic partner is especially devoted to them. In turn, flaunting designer handbags and shoes was effective at deterring other women from poaching a relationship partner. This research identifies a novel function of conspicuous consumption, revealing that luxury products and brands play important roles in relationships.
暂无摘要（点击查看原文获取完整内容）
This ambitious book explores the role of empire in world history. What does it mean to be an empire? How does one empire differ from another? Why does an empire rise and why fall? Why have empires flourished in some eras and regions of the world but not in others? On an unusually wide canvas, Dominic Lieven addresses all these questions. His central focus is on the rise and fall of empire in Russia and the Soviet Union. The dynamics of empire's history in Russia are explored through comparisons not only between the tsarist and Soviet periods but also between Russia, its great contemporaries and rivals of the Ottoman, Habsburg and British empires, and a broad range of other cases from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States, Indonesia, India and the European Union. Dominic Lieven shows that many of empire's dilemmas still have force in today's world. His perspective throws light on the current crisis in the former USSR by comparing post-Soviet problems and dangers with the upheavals caused by the collapse of other leading powers' empires. A fresh view of many of today's most intractable issues is also provided, from the troubles in Ulster to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the fate of Russian, British, German and Asian diasporas stranded by the collapse of empire.
In 3 experiments, mating primes interacted with functionally relevant individual differences to guide basic, lower order social perception. A visual cuing method assessed biases in attentional adhesion--a tendency to have one's attention captured by particular social stimuli. Mate-search primes increased attentional adhesion to physically attractive members of the opposite sex (potential mates) among participants with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation but not among sexually restricted participants (Studies 1 and 2). A mate-guarding prime increased attentional adhesion to physically attractive members of one's own sex (potential rivals) among participants who were concerned with threats posed by intrasexual competitors but not among those less concerned about such threats (Study 3). Findings are consistent with a functionalist approach to motivation and social cognition and highlight the utility of integrating evolutionary and social cognitive perspectives.