This paper presents a political economy model of public standards in an open economy model. We use the model to derive the political optimum and to analyze different factors that have an influence on this political equilibrium. The paper discusses how the level of development influences the political equilibrium. We also analyze the relation between trade and the political equilibrium and compa...

We study an optimum-taxation model, where individuals differ not only in earning abilities, but also in inherited endowments. We show first that an expenditure tax (which is equivalent to a tax on endowments), combined with an optimum nonlinear income tax, is desirable according to a utilitarian social objective, if on average high-able individuals have larger endowments that low-able. Secondly...

In the last years, tablets and smartphones have been widely used with the very same purpose as desktop computers: web browsing, social networking, banking and others, just to name a few. However, we are often facing the problem of keeping our information protected and trustworthy. As a result of their popularity and functionality, mobile devices are a growing target for malicious activities. In...

We develop an efficient algorithm for computing pure strategy Nash equilibria that satisfy various criteria (such as the utilitarian or Nash–Bernoulli social welfare functions) in games with sparse interaction structure. Our algorithm, called Valued Nash Propagation (VNP), integrates the optimisation problem of maximising a criterion with the constraint satisfaction problem of finding a game’s ...

A vote-buying mechanism is such that each agent chooses a quantity of votes x to cast for an alternative at a cost c(x), and the outcome is determined by the total number of votes cast for each alternative. In the context of binary decisions, we prove that the welfare optima that can be implemented by vote-buying mechanisms in large societies are parameterized by a positive parameter ρ, which m...

This paper explores website link structure considering websites as interconnected graphs and analyzing their features as a social network. Two networks have been extracted for representing websites: a domain network containing subdomains or external domains linked through the website and a page network containing webpages browsed from the root domain. Factor analysis provides the statistical me...

This paper analyzes a model of early morning traffic congestion, that is a special case of the model considered in Newell (1988). A fixed number of identical vehicles travel along a single-lane road of constant width from a common origin to a common destination, with LWR flow congestion and Greenshields’ Relation. Vehicles have a common work start time, late arrivals are not permitted, and trip...

It is essential to choose suitable habitat when reintroducing a species into its former range. Habitat quality may influence an individual's dispersal decisions and also ultimately where they choose to settle. We examined whether variation in habitat quality (quantified by the level of ground vegetation cover and the installation of nest boxes) influenced the movement, habitat choice and surviv...