Brown University

About: Brown University is a education organization based out in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 35778 authors who have published 90896 publications receiving 4471489 citations. The organization is also known as: brown.edu & Brown.

Communication and punishment in voluntary contribution experiments

Abstract: We compare two devices previously found to increase contributions to public goods in laboratory experiments: communication, and punishment (allowing subjects to engage in costly reductions of one another's earnings after learning of their contribution decisions). We find that communication increases contributions more than punishment, and, taking into account the cost of punishment, only communication significantly increases subjects' earnings and thus efficiency. We study three forms of communication to understand what elements of communication are essential to this result: exchanges of nume rical messages, exchanges of verbal messages through a computer chat room, and face-to-face communication. Compared with a baseline of no communication and no punishment, we find that chat room communication increases cooperation and efficiency nearly as much as face-to-face communication, even though the chat room environment does not communicate cues of facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. Verbal communication is so effective that adding a punishment option to it does not significantly change the level of contributions or earnings. In contrast, communication limited to sending numerical messages has no net effect on contributions or efficiency.

Observation of a new boson with mass near 125 GeV in pp collisions at $ \sqrt{s}=7 $ and 8 TeV

Abstract: A detailed description is reported of the analysis used by the CMS Collaboration in the search for the standard model Higgs boson in pp collisions at the LHC, which led to the observation of a new boson. The data sample corresponds to integrated luminosities up to 5.1 inverse femtobarns at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV, and up to 5.3 inverse femtobarns at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV. The results for five Higgs boson decay modes gamma gamma, ZZ, WW, tau tau, and bb, which show a combined local significance of 5 standard deviations near 125 GeV, are reviewed. A fit to the invariant mass of the two high resolution channels, gamma gamma and ZZ to 4 ell, gives a mass estimate of 125.3 +/- 0.4 (stat) +/- 0.5 (syst) GeV. The measurements are interpreted in the context of the standard model Lagrangian for the scalar Higgs field interacting with fermions and vector bosons. The measured values of the corresponding couplings are compared to the standard model predictions. The hypothesis of custodial symmetry is tested through the measurement of the ratio of the couplings to the W and Z bosons. All the results are consistent, within their uncertainties, with the expectations for a standard model Higgs boson.