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Exclusion has long been employed as a common disciplinary measure against defectors, both at work and in social life. In this paper, we study the effect of excludability - exclusion of the lowest contributor - on contributions in three different team production settings. We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that excludability increases contributions. Excludability is particularly effective in production settings where the average or maximum effort determines team production. In these settings, we observe almost immediate convergence to full contribution. In settings where the minimum effort determines team production, excludability leads to a large increase in contributions only if the value of the excluded individual's contribution to the public good is redistributed among the included individuals

This paper considers learning rules for environments in which little prior and feedback information is available to the decision maker. Two properties of such learning rules are studied: absolute expediency and monotonicity. Both require that some aspect of the decision maker's performance improves from the current period to the next. The paper provides some necessary, and some sufficient conditions for these properties. It turns out that there is a large variety of learning rules that have the properties. However, all learning rules that have these properties are related to the replicator dynamics of evolutionary game theory. For the case in which there are only two actions, it is shown that one of the absolutely expedient learning rules dominates all others.

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Due to the globalization and interconnectedness of people from different cultures, intercultural competence is a prerequisite to communicating effectively across different cultures.  The Intercultural Sensitivity Inventory (ICSI) measures a person’s ability to modify behavior in culturally appropriate ways when coming into contact with diverse cultures.  The ICSI is a measurement based on the concepts of individualism and collectivism. The majority of research on intercultural competence and intercultural sensitivity (ICS) has primarily focused on adult populations in business, international education exchange programs, and adult third culture kids (ATCKs).  However, such research involving high school students attending an international school outside of the United States is scant.  The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the differences in intercultural sensitivity (ICS) among Third Culture Kids (TCKs).  Specifically, this study assessed the differences in ICS among the independent variables of gender and participant’s passport country.  Additionally, the study examined the difference in ICS between Korean females and non-Korean females.  The ICSI was used to measure the participants’ ICS.  The sample consists of 139 international high school students.  The independent samples t-test revealed no statistically significant in ICS among males and females, as well as Korean females and non-Korean females.  However, the results revealed a statistically significant difference between Korean and non-Korean students.  Korean students scored lowered on the ICSI than their counterparts.

The genetic diversity of sweet potato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.] and its wild relatives has been collected and conserved in germplasm collections worldwide and explored employing several tools. The characterization of crops diversity through morphological tools produce useful information. However, the use of conventional morphological descriptions exhibits limitations due to the use of subjective and categorical parameters that affect phenotypic description and diversity estimation. In order to increase the efficiency to discriminate different phenotypes not detected by conventional morphological descriptors, new phenomic approaches were used. Seventy sweet potato accessions collected in the northern coast of Colombia were characterized by forty-nine parameters from conventional sweet potato descriptors and data obtained by RGB imaging and colourimetry. Field descriptions, RGB imagingcolourimetry and both databases integrated were analysed using Gower's general similarity coefficient

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