We evaluate the impact of three auction mechanisms -the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism, the second-price auction, and the random nth-price auction -in the measurement of willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) measures of value. Our results show that initial bidding in trial 1 in each auction does not contradict the endowment effect; but that, if it is the endowment effect that governs people's initial bidding behavior, it can be eliminated with repetitions of a second-price or random nth-price auction; and if the thesis is that the effect should persist across auctions and across trials is right, our results suggest that there is no fundamental endowment effect.

Abstract. We establish existence and various estimates of fundamental matrices and Green's matrices for divergence form, second order strongly parabolic systems in arbitrary cylindrical domains under the assumption that solutions of the systems satisfy an interior Hölder continuity estimate. We present a unified approach valid for both the scalar and the vectorial cases.

Purpose: To assess the characteristics of bone metastasis from hepatocellular carcinoma and the radiation field arrangement based on imaging studies.Materials and Methods: Fifty-three patients (84 lesions) with bone metastasis from a primary hepatocellular carcinoma completed palliative radiation therapy. All patients underwent one of following imaging studies prior to the initiation of radiation therapy: a bone scan, computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging. The median radiation dose was 30 Gy (7∼40 Gy). We evaluated retrospectively the presence of soft tissue formation and the adjustment of the radiation field based on the imaging studies.Results

Abstract2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), a prototypic halogenated aromatic hydrocarbon (HAH), is known as one of the most potent toxicants. At least a part of its toxic effects appears to be derived from its ability to induce TNF-α production. However, the signaling pathway of TCDD that leads to TNF-α expression has not been elucidated. In this study, we investigated the signaling mechanism of TCDD-induced TNF-α expression in PMA-differentiated THP-1 macrophages. TCDD induced both mRNA and protein expression of TNF-α in a dose-and time-dependent manner. α-Naphthoflavone (NF), an aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) inhibitor, prevented the TCDD-induced expression of TNF-α at both mRNA and protein levels. Genistein, a protein tyrosine kinase (PTK) inhibitor, and PD153035, an EGFR inhibitor, also blocked the increase of TNF-α expression by TCDD, indicating the role of EGFR in TCDD-induced TNF-α expression. On the other hand, PP2, a c-Src specific inhibitor, did not affect TCDD-induced TNF-α expression. EGFR phosphorylation was detected as early as 5 min after TCDD treatment. TCDD-induced EGFR activation was AhR-dependent since co-treatment with α-NF prevented it. ERK was found to be a downstream effector of EGFR activation in the signaling pathway leading to TNF-α production after TCDD stimulation. Activation of ERK was observed from 30 min after TCDD treatment. PD98059, an inhibitor of the MEK-ERK pathway, completely prevented the TNF-α mRNA and protein expression induced by TCDD, whereas inhibitors of JNK and p38 MAPK had no effect. PD153035, an EGFR inhibitor, as well as α-NF significantly reduced ERK phosphorylation, suggesting that ERK activation by TCDD was mediated by both EGFR and AhR. These results indicate that TNF-α production by TCDD in differentiated THP-1 macrophages is AhR-dependent and involves activation of EGFR and ERK, but not c-Src, JNK, nor p38 MAPK. A signaling pathway is proposed where TCDD induces sequential activation of AhR, EGFR and ERK, leading to the increased expression of TNF-α.

We establish global Gaussian estimates for the Green's matrix of divergence form, second order parabolic systems in a cylindrical domain under the assumption that weak solutions of the system vanishing on a portion of the boundary satisfy a certain local boundedness estimate and a local Hölder estimate. From these estimates, we also derive global estimates for the Green's matrix for elliptic systems with bounded measurable coefficients in two dimensional domains. We present a unified approach valid for both the scalar and vectorial cases and discuss several applications of our result.

We are able to derive lower and upper bounds for the Green's function for the parabolic operator of the divergence form. These estimates hold over the whole domain. Similar results were obtained by E. Davies and Q. Zhang, respectively. Mathematics Subject Classifications (2000)35A08 · 35B05 · 35K10 · 31B25.

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