Judgment aggregation problems form a class of collective decision-making problems represented in an abstract way, subsuming some well known problems such as voting. A collective decision can be reached in many ways, but a direct one-step aggregation of individual decisions is arguably most studied. Another way to reach collective decisions is by iterative consensus building – allowing each deci...

the article depicts the situation before cold war in which developing countries (dcs) and least developed countries (ldcs) found themselves big loser, as they were deprived from participation in trade negotiation process, leading into establishment of gatt . therefore, they resorted to unctad  as the sole defender of their interests against developed countries in trade negotiations. unctad has ...

The article depicts the situation before Cold War in which developing countries (DCs) and least Developed countries (LDCs) found themselves big loser, as they were deprived from participation in trade negotiation process, leading into establishment of GATT . Therefore, they resorted to UNCTAD  as the sole defender of their interests against Developed Countries in trade negotiations. UNCTAD has ...

In this paper, we study finite-time state consensus problems for continuous nonlinear multi-agent systems. Building on the theory of finite-time Lyapunov stability, we propose sufficient criteria which guarantee the system to reach a consensus in finite time, provided that the underlying directed network contains a spanning tree. Novel finite-time consensus protocols are introduced as examples ...

Environmental management decisions typically lie at the interface of science and public policy. Consequently, these decisions involve a number of stakeholders with competing agendas and vested interests in the ultimate decision. In such cases, it is appropriate to adopt formal methods for consensus building to ensure transparent and repeatable decisions. In this paper, we use an environmental m...

Approximate consensus is an important building block for distributed systems, used overtly or implicitly in applications as diverse as formation control, sensor fusion, and synchronization. Laplacian-based consensus, the current dominant approach, is extremely accurate and resilient, but converges slowly. Comparing Laplacian-based consensus to exact consensus algorithms, relaxing the requiremen...

The consensus-building processes that characterize many environmental partnerships are often thwarted by cognitive conflict, which occurs when stakeholders have conflicting beliefs about the parameters of environmental problems and institutional performance. The author argues cognitive conflict results from stakeholders behaving like intuitive lawyers, who interpret uncertain situations in ways...