We study the geographic distribution of military supply contracts during World War II. This is a unique case, since over $3 trillion current day dollars was spent, and there were concerns that the country’s future hinged on the war outcome. We find robust evidence consistent with the hypothesis that economic factors dominated the allocation of supply contracts, and that political factors—or at ...

In this position paper, we consider some foundational topics regarding smart contracts (such as terminology, automation, enforceability, and semantics) and define a smart contract as an agreement whose execution is both automatable and enforceable. We explore a simple semantic framework for smart contracts, covering both operational and non-operational aspects. We describe templates and agreeme...

This paper describes methods for identifying appropriate software components for an application and for specifying the components’ operations rigorously. It uses the theory and methods of the design by contract approach for specification of the functionality. The actual implementations of a component’s operations are hidden from the clients and encapsulated within the component. A component com...

Under the U.S. Special Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, the three major infant formula manufacturers compete for WIC supply contracts, state by state. Policy makers have been puzzled by why the contracted WIC price is extremely low compared to the non-WIC price. Our explanation is that winning the WIC contract is extremely valuable to a manufacturer because of a...

OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence, (O)SI for (Open) Social Intelligence, PbD for Privacy by Design. The CAPER project has built an OSINT solution oriented to the prevention of organized crime. How to balance freedom and security? This position paper describes a way to embed the legal and ethical issues raised by the General Data Reform Package (GDRP) in Europe into this kind of surveill...

The rapid uptake of mobile and digital technologies has the potential to radically transform city-visiting experiences. This will result in a transition from technology that is owned and delivered by tourism organisations towards software developed by third party organisations that is owned and managed directly by tourists. Tourism providers in destinations must collaborate in service provision...

Dieser Text betrachtet die weitere Entwicklung des Internet unter dem Fokus der Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Architektur und ihrer Anwendung für das Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Er zeigt die Probleme auf, die entstehen, wenn man die Entschlüsselung von Daten an Systemzustände koppelt. Er schließt mit grundlegenden Einwänden gegen DRM.

This paper deals with the modeling and the automatic implementation of constraints in component based applications. Constraints have been assuming an ever more relevant role in modeling distributed systems as long as business rules implementation, design-by-contract practice, and faulttolerance requirements are concerned. Nevertheless, component developers are not sufficiently supported by exis...

Quantity discount pricing is a common practice used by business-to-business and business-toconsumer companies. A key characteristic of quantity discount pricing is that the marginal price declines with higher purchase quantities. In this paper, we propose a choice-based conjoint model for estimating consumer-level willingness-to-pay (WTP) for varying quantities of a product and for designing op...