This article studies the optimal use of fines and imprisonment when an offender’s level of wealth cannot be observed by the enforcement authority. I employ a model in which there are two types of offenders — a low-wealth type and a high-wealth type. The consequence of the unobservability of wealth depends on whether the enforcement authority would employ fines alone, or would also impose impris...

This article examines how justice and social order are administered and experienced in poor, politically fragile and conflict-affected environments. Taking notions of legal pluralism and public authority as our starting point, we explore how moral and social worlds are understood in places where ‘the law’ is not necessarily a discrete institutionalised process. Drawing upon current debates in t...

In this paper we introduce a semantics for agent communication languages based on social networks, providing us with a principled way to define and reason about their dynamics. As an instance we consider dependence networks, where the social relations represent that an agent depends on another agent to achieve its intentions. We suggest how FIPA semantics can be reconstructed in this social sem...