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Essays in Bargaining and Cooperative Game Theory with an Application to Environmental Negotiations
Full text linkEven when cooperation is clearly advantageous, attaining it is not to be taken for granted. In fact, in order to undertake a mutually beneficial joint activity, the parties must agree on the division of the gains granted by it. The self-interested nature that is supposed to characterize the same parties might then become a serious obstacle to the collectively rational choice of cooperating. Bargaining and Cooperative Game Theory are the two principal frameworks that are used by economists to investigate this puzzling but fascinating problem. In particular, if the latter proposes solutions to hypothetical bargaining problems according to normative principles such as egalitarianism and marginalism, the former examine the same problem from a positive perspective focusing on the relation between the rules of the bargaining process and its outcomes.
The present Doctoral Thesis employs both these frameworks in a complementary way. Specifically, it proposes two novel solution concepts for transferable utility games in characteristic function form and a bargaining model whose outcome is exactly one of such solutions. It further compares different solution concepts with regard to their redistributive properties and their resilience to free riding.
The Doctoral Thesis is composed by four standing alone, but interlinked, works forming the four chapters in which it is divided. Chapter 1 offers a literature review of bargaining models. Chapter 2 presents the two novel solution concepts: the Central Core and the Mid-central Core. Chapter 3 proposes the Burning Coalition Bargaining Model, a non cooperative bargaining model whose outcome, under a specific response strategy profile, is the Mid-central Core. Finally, Chapter 4 benchmarks different solution concepts through a numerical simulation based on an environmental game
Bacterial outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) as a platform for personalized cancer vaccines
Full text linkCancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide. Tumor cells contain several mutations that can generate neoepitopes, targets of an effective anti-cancer T cell response. Increasing evidence demonstrated that cancer vaccines targeting neoepitopes are effective and safe both in preclinical models and human patients. Bacterial Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMVs) are naturally produced by all Gram-negative bacteria. They contain several Microbe-Associated-Molecular Patterns (MAMPs), crucial for stimulating innate immunity and promoting adaptive immune responses. The ability to engineer OMVs with cancer epitopes together with their unique adjuvanticity and safety make them a particularly interesting vaccine platform.
In this study, we have demonstrated that immunization of mice with OMVs activate both innate and adaptive immunity and induce a Th1 immune response, fundamental for an effective cancer vaccine. OMV immunization also caused upregulation of genes involved in MAMPs detection and signal transduction, a central component of the inflammasome and pro-inflammatory cytokines. OMV vaccination induced an upregulation of Th1 key transcription factor and cytokines, while inducing a downregulation of transcription factor and cytokines associated to Th2 response. Moreover, cytokines released by activated macrophages, DCs, T cells and natural killer (NK) cells were induced by OMV vaccination, together with a key chemokine and a protein for immune cell recruitment and adhesion, respectively.
We have successfully engineered OMVs on the surface and in the lumen with OVA(257-264) CD8 T cell model epitope. These OVA-engineered OMVs induced a high percentage of OVA(257-264) specific CD8 T cells and protected mice from OVA-expressing tumors. We have shown that OMVs engineered with a tumor specific antigen (TSA) induced a protective response and promoted a significant recruitment of CD4 and CD8 T cells into tumors, while reducing both CD4 regulatory T cells (Tregs) and myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs). We have also shown in the same mouse model that vaccination with OMVs engineered with two TSAs have a synergistic protective activity in controlling tumor growth. Finally, we have demonstrated that therapeutic OMV vaccines targeting five different neoepitopes protect mice from tumor growth.
Taken together, our results show that OMVs are a promising platform for effective personalized cancer vaccines
La fin de non-recevoir nell'esperienza del processo civile francese: storia e funzioni di un istituto
Full text linkIl presente studio è dedicato alla categoria delle fins de non-recevoir, un istituto proprio dell'ordinamento processuale francese che si pone accanto alle exceptions de procédure e alle défenses au fond e che, solo superficialmente, può essere assimilata alla categoria delle condizioni dell'azione. Ciò malgrado, nel diritto processuale civile francese regnano ancora oggi numerose incertezze attorno alla natura della fin de non-recevoir, una constatazione che potrà risultare sorprendente a proposito di un istituto apparso in Francia nel XIV secolo e che non ha più cessato, a partire da quel momento, di essere sollevato davanti a corti e tribunali. Invero, come si avrà modo di illustrare nel corso di questa dissertazione, questa incertezza ha un'anima antica che solo in parte è stata riscattata dai nuovi approdi, specie in materia di teoria dell'azione, raggiunti dalla dottrina francese nel corso del XX secolo
The European Union and Member State Building in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Full text linkThe EU enlargement policy aims to transform applicant countries into fully-fledged member states, committed to abiding by the EU acquis and able to take part in the EU decisionmaking and policy implementation processes. However, the contestation of the state, or contested statehood, has been identified as the key variable hindering Europeanisation in the Western Balkans. This has led the European Union (EU) to fall into cycles of mismanaged conditionality, such as in the police reform process and the constitutional reform process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yet, the EU has learned to adapt, enacting practices of state building to cope with contested statehood.
By bridging the literature on European integration, state building, and Europeanisation, this study traces the transformations of sovereignty and of the state throughout European integration, and identifies the polity ideas that underpin EU practices of ‘member state building’ in the notion of sovereignty as participation. Member state building is interested in reinforcing administrative capacities with the aim of participation in EU processes, while also enhancing the legitimacy of institutions via the export of consensus-generating mechanisms.
Two case studies, exemplifying the two statehood dimensions of legitimacy and capacity, allow examining how the EU interacts with Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the framework of the Structured Dialogue on Justice and of the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance, the EU introduced in Bosnia and Herzegovina consensus-generating mechanisms, aimed at restoring both administrative capacities and domestic legitimacy of institutions.
The role of the EU as an interested mediator and the emancipatory potential of the accession perspective set member state building apart from ‘liberal peace’ international state building. Member state building thus emerges as an enlargement-specific form of EU-led state building, allowing the EU to cope with contested statehood in its candidate countries and potential candidates and to build member states while integrating them
Drawing the User Experience of Young Children
Get PDFThe aim of this thesis is to analyse the trustworthiness of drawing as a method for evaluating the User Experience of young children (age 3-6). This method is not new in Child-Computer Interaction, but few studies have investigated it with young children in the kindergarten. This thesis analyses data collected in two case studies. A first longitudinal study, involving 27 participants, was aimed at investigating children’s UX when interacting with a system allowing for collective music making by physical movement. The second study, involving 31 participants, investigated children’s interaction with a tangible user interface detecting colours and emitting sound according to them. Both studies comprised a drawing activity to be run right after the end of each interactive session. Drawings were thematically analysed and contrasted with opinions gathered by adults attending the interactive sessions with the children (designers, teachers, researchers). According to the analysis, information that can be found in the drawings proves sufficiently trustworthy to capture young children’s UX, but it is strongly affected by age, and requires a mediation by teachers to be interpreted
Otlone di Sant'Emmerano, Vita sancti Nicolai (BHL 6126). Edizione critica, traduzione e commento
Full text linkPrima edizione critica di una Vita latina di San Nicola di Myra, celebre taumaturgo di origine turca. Si tratta inoltre dell'unica opera inedita del monaco benedettino Otlone di Sant'Emmerano, originario di Ratisbona, vissuto nel secolo XI
Children's representation of spatial boundaries
Full text linkFinding the way home, orienting into familiar and unfamiliar environments, computing our place and position with reference to internal and external cues are essential everyday tasks for animals. It is generally acknowledged that these tasks are accomplished by the brain by means of the internal formation of complex spatial representation, the so called “cognitive maps”. How the brain can form these cognitive maps is a very debated issue in the field of neuroscience. An important stream of research tried to find out what the main environmental features the brain tends to store while navigating are. In order to investigate this, researchers have observed the behavior of animals after being disoriented in a familiar environment. The reorientation paradigm turned out to be a very interesting tool to study spatial cognition because it allows researchers to figure out which environmental components the animals remember and rely on in order to find their way after they have lost track of their heading and position. Experiments with both human adults, children and nonhuman animals have shown that an important feature of the environment the subjects tend to store to reorient is the geometry of the boundaries’ layout (e.g., room shape). Children from as early as 2 years of age have been shown to be able to use the geometric shape of the spatial layout by searching an object hidden in one corner of a rectangular enclosure both in the correct corner and in its geometric equivalent. But which perceptual and physical factors define spatial boundaries? Which geometric components of boundaries are children most sensitive to? How are the same geometric components used in other spatial tasks such as map reading?
In our studies we tried to answer these fundamental questions. In our first study we investigated whether children are sensitive to boundaries that constitute either physical or visual obstacles. To this aim we tested children in a reorientation task with both an arena made up of transparent surfaces and an arena made up of opaque surfaces. By using transparent surfaces, we were able to minimize the visually occlusive component of the boundaries but leave intact its physical component. Opaque boundaries presented, instead, both the visual and physical components. In our second study, we further investigated how does the material and visual appearance of boundaries affect navigation by testing children in an arena made up of 20 closely-aligned objects. In this experiment we made the surfaces visually discontinuous, but the configuration of objects was made sufficiently dense to prevent movement and to underline the geometric structure. In our third study, we asked which components of the Euclidean geometry are children most sensitive to while navigating by geometric boundaries and making a map task. In particular we investigated the use of distance and length both in a reorientation task and a map-placement task.
The results showed that important developmental changes occur in children’s representation of spatial boundaries and of their geometric components. In particular children became proficient at using transparent surfaces only at the age of five and they start using boundaries made up of closely- aligned objects at the age of seven. At the same time, we showed that the young children (36 to 42 months) reorient correctly in a disorientation task by using the geometric property of distance, rather than length. The same group of children were shown not to be able to use distance nor length in a map task, while they showed the ability to use angle.
These results suggest that not all kinds of boundaries are processed equally by children and that their visual aspect might be more important that their property of being obstacles to movement, particularly early in development. They are important because they inform of which material and physical properties of boundaries children are most sensitive to and they can help understanding how to design and build safe environments for children. Moreover, they suggest the geometric property used by young children to reorient is distance, essentially contributing to the wide debate on how children and animals could solve the reorientation task. Finally, they showed that the use of geometric properties in a reorientation task and in a map task might have two different developmental trajectories, suggesting these two competences might be mediated by two different systems and providing an important insight into the development of geometric competences in children
A New Design For the Support of Collaborative Care Work in Nursing Homes
Full text linkNursing homes are complex healthcare settings that take care of older adults with sever cognitive and physical impairments. Given the conditions of the patients, nursing homes can be considered end-of-life contexts. There, the care work that aim to mitigate and treat the conditions of the patients it is the result of the collaboration between the care professionals and the relatives of the patients. Indeed, when the patients are very old adults in a end-of-life situation, the provision of care often involves a family caregiver as the main point of contact for the healthcare service. However, caring for institutionalized older adults is known to be a complex issue both for the families of the older adults and the care professionals. Over the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in this topic primarily due to a growing older population and, hence, a heightened need of research contributions in this area. Previous studies on caregiving for older adults living in nursing homes recognize the necessity to support professionals’ work practices to ameliorate their working conditions, and decrease the risk of burnout and job dissatisfaction, as well as to relieve the families of the patients from the burden of caring for their loved ones. Yet, the literature shows a lack of solutions in terms of technologies for this kind of environments. In this thesis we report an extensive study and analysis we performed within a network of six and nursing homes located in the northern Italy.We investigated the practice of caregiving within the nursing homes. In particular, we focused on the work practices of care professionals, and on the relational issues between the care professionals and the families of the patients. We conducted, first, an exploratory study to comprehend the nature of our research context. Afterwards, we carried out a series of participatory design sessions and validation workshops to elicit the requirements for the development of a new technology platform to support the collaboration between care professionals and relatives of older patients.
The outcomes of this work shed new light on the opportunities of using ICT solutions to improve relations and information sharing among caregivers. Indeed, our findings state that the organizational and relational complexity of nursing homes emphasize how poor communication practices hinder the collaboration and the mutual understanding between the relatives of the patients and the care professional. As a result, we deliver a series of functional requirements for the development of a technology platform that aims to support relationships, communication, and coordination among care professionals, and between care professionals and families of the patients
Distributed live streaming on mesh networks
Full text linkInternet is evolving in both its structure and usage patterns; this work addresses two trends: i) the increasing popularity and the related generated traffic of media streaming applications and ii) the emerging of network portions following different philosophies from the rest of the internet and being characterized by a mesh topology, such as Community Networks.
This thesis presents a modeling for decentralized live streaming for mesh networks based on graph theory, considering the different inter-dependent network abstractions involved.
It proposes optimization strategies based on popular centrality metrics, such as betweenness and PageRank.
Results on real-world datasets validate the theoretical work and the derived optimizing strategies are implemented in open-source streaming platforms
Musical Expertise and rhythm processing
Full text linkFor decades, researchers have been trying to understand how the human mind/brain processes rhythm and time in general. Within this framework, many studies have explored the influence of long-term musical training on the neural and behavioral correlates of rhythm processing. Some pieces of evidence point to enhanced rhythm processing in musicians as one of the consequences of the structural and functional changes in many brain areas involved in auditory processing, motor synchronization and cognitive control. Yet there is still more controversy than consensus on this field. Indeed, several behavioral and neural studies report opposite results and describe contrasting effects associated to rhythm perception in musicians and non-musicians.
The aim of the project described in this thesis was to shed new light on the effects of long-term musical training on the behavioral and neural correlates of rhythm processing. First, I addressed whether musical expertise influences rhythm processing when this is not task-relevant. Next, I expanded the investigation to the ability of musicians to orient efficiently attention in time. I explored these questions by looking at behavioral and electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates associated to the detection of auditory deviant stimuli.
Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the current knowledge on rhythm processing. After a description of the most influential theories of temporal elaboration, it introduces some of the electrophysiological correlates associated to regularity violation. Then, it provides a detailed description of the neural and behavioral changes triggered by a long-term musical training, focusing on rhythm processing. At the end of this introduction, the aims and hypotheses of each experiment are presented in detail. In Chapter 2, I describe two behavioral experiments that explored how the processing of different temporal structures (rhythmical, non-rhythmical) influences the detection of deviant stimuli (Experiment 1), and addressed the role of a refined metrical representation in musicians and non-musicians (Experiment 2). The results revealed an overall superior performance of musicians in all experimental conditions, thus pointing to an enhanced auditory perception as consequence of their musical training. The results also highlight a large-scale processing of rhythm, independent of musical expertise. Furthermore, the results on response speed indicate a refined metrical processing only in musicians. Thus, the first part of the thesis demonstrates that long-term musical training boosts meter processing, whereas (some form of) rhythm processing appears to be overall present in all individuals.
In Chapter 3, I report an EEG experiment which was aimed at exploring the effects of long-term musical training on the neural correlates of auditory deviance violation (Mismatch Negativity – MMN and Middle Latency Responses - MLRs), by inserting deviant stimuli in rhythmical (at strong and weak metrical positions) and non-rhythmical structures. Deviant stimuli within rhythmical structures elicited larger MMN compared to non-rhythmical ones in all participants. Moreover, the MMN was also modulated by meter as showed by the smaller amplitude for deviants at strong than weak positions. Interestingly, a deeper investigation of the neural modulations associated to the strong positions revealed a stronger response in musicians than non-musicians. This demonstrates the prevailing effect of stimulus salience (strong metrical positions and frequency deviant at these positions) over the effect of prediction for musicians. Finally, effect of long-term musical training modulated the MLRs for deviants within rhythmical structures. Taken together, these results indicate an effect of musical expertise at early and late stages of deviance perception, as evidenced by modulations of the MLR and MMN responses.
Chapter 4 reports the results of a cross-modal cueing experiment aimed at investigating the influence of long-term musical training on the ability to orient attention in time using external cues. Besides behavioral and ERP responses, here I examined a particular neural response associated to entrainment: the steady state evoked potential (SS-EP). The results showed that auditory cues greatly facilitate attention orienting in time. Furthermore, targets preceded by short intervals were highly expected and this was visible both at the behavioral (high efficiency and more anticipations) and neural (larger CNV and reduced P300 amplitude) levels. Effects of musical expertise were present only in behavioral data and only when considering the mostly trained sensory modality (audition). Finally, musicians were less synchronized to the rhythm than non-musicians (reduced SS-EPs). In sum, these results indicate that the auditory modality better guide temporal orienting than the visual one, and that this effect is magnified for musicians. Finally, weaker synchronization to rhythm in musicians may mirror the ease with which they process rhythm. Chapter 5 is a summary of the main results and of their interpretation