There has been a lot of news coming out of Iraq in recent decades, but most of it ignores the situation for people on the ground: ordinary men, women and children who continue trying to live their lives in spite of wars, economic sanctions, violence, and social, political and cultural collapse. The challenges of maintaining and sustaining health in an environment where everything-the human spir...

This paper proposes a combined mechanism for coordinating agents in timed normative multi-agent systems. Timing constraints in a multi-agent system make it possible to force action execution to happen before certain time invariants are violated. In such multiagent systems we achieve coordination at two orthogonal levels with respect to states and actions. On the one hand, the behaviour of indiv...

We analyze a model in which there is socially inefficient competition among people. In this model, self-enforcing social norms can potentially control the inefficient competition. However, the inefficient behavior often cannot be suppressed in equilibrium among those with the lowest income due to the ineffectiveness of sanctions against those in the society with the least to lose. We demonstrat...

The United States has long leveraged economic sanctions as powerful instruments to achieve foreign policy objectives [1]. Economic sanctions have been described as a “cheaper form of coercion, less aggressive than war with fewer human costs, and more politically feasible” [1]. Sanctions may be implemented as tariffs on imported goods, quotas on how much can be imported or exported, embargoes th...

As an alternative to traditional juvenile courts, juvenile drug courts attempt to provide substance abuse treatment, sanctions, and incentives to rehabilitate nonviolent drug-involved youth, empower families to support them in this process, and prevent recidivism. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) sponsored a multisite study of juvenile drug courts to examine the...

The environment is an essential component of multi-agent systems and is often used to coordinate the behaviour of individual agents. Recently many languages have been proposed to specify and implement multi-agent environments in terms of social and normative concepts. In this paper, we first introduce a formal setting of multi-agent environment which abstracts from concrete specification langua...

Institutions are systematic patterns of shared expectations, taken-for-granted assumptions, accepted norms and routines of interaction that have robust effects on shaping the motivations and behaviour of sets of interconnected social actors. In modern societies, they are usually embodied in authoritatively coordinated organizations with formal rules and the capacity to impose coercive sanctions...

Normative environments for multi-agent systems provide means to monitor and enforce agents’ compliance to their commitments. However, when the normative space is imperfect, contracts to which norms apply may be unbalanced, and agents may exploit potential flaws to their own advantage. In this paper we analyze how a normative framework endowed with a simple adaptive deterrence sanctioning model ...

Abstract This article is an empirical attempt to explore the relationship between sanctions (financial and non-financial), oil price shocks and Iran-Russian bilateral trade flows over the period 1991–2014. In contrast to earlier studies in which a gravity model has been estimated through a panel data approach, in this paper the authors apply a gravity model for only two countries and do the es...

Past research on information technology (IT) security training and awareness has focused on informing employees about security policies and formal sanctions for violating those policies. However, research suggests that deterrent sanctions may not be the most powerful influencer of employee violations. Often, employees use rationalizations, termed neutralization techniques, to overcome the effec...