I describe a model of strategic communication within groups in policy-making situations with decentralized policy-making authority. I show that, in a cheap-talk environment, inclusion and exclusion of agents can affect the credibility of signaling between agents and, accordingly, both the quality of individual policy decisions and social welfare. Somewhat surprisingly, the inclusion of agents c...

Finding people is essential in finding information. Librarians and information scientists have studied authority control psychologists and sociologists social networks. In aforementioned, authors link to documents (and co-authors) creating access points to information. In latter, social paths serve as channels for rumours as well as expertise. Key problems include identification and disambiguat...

events) are common occurrences in both democracies and in authoritarian regimes. Although we typically associate civil unrest with disruptions and instability, social scientists believe that civil unrest reflects the democratic process by which citizens communicate their views and preferences to those in authority. The advent of social media has afforded the citizenry new mechanisms for organiz...

A cross-sectional study was conducted to determine the risk factors of job-related depression in laboratory technicians in Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia (HUSM) and Kementerian Kesihatan Malaysia (KKM) Hospitals in Kelantan, between September 2001 and February 2002. One hundred and two laboratory technicians from HUSM and 79 from KKM Hospitals were selected and 84 (82.4%) from HUSM and 71 (...

The facilities available to disabled people living in Scotland were studied by visiting and interviewing a group of 50 paraplegics living in Glasgow and the surrounding counties. The degree of unemployment in the group (74%) was far greater than has been reported in other surveys, and no quadriplegic was in remunerative employment. Though the general unemployment level in the area is high servi...

Privacy preferences are the handling rules and constraints under which a data subject allows a third party to process, store, and use his personal data. We have analysed Facebook and show how the Social Network System fails to collect, manage, and hand-over to third-parties user’s consent. Todays technical solutions of collecting the consent on the Internet can be argued to fullfil the regulato...

This paper addresses the problem of enabling non-scripted social interaction with virtual characters, and of authoring the underlying behavior in reusable form. We hypothesize that social behavior can be decomposed into social games, which are collections of affordances surrounding social state, and claim that non-scripted player interactions can be generated by the execution of social games in...

The paper provides an economic rationale for punishing repeat offenders with increasing sanctions. We analyse the optimal intertemporal punishment scheme within an infinite game framework. The legal authority is assumed to minimize the social cost of punishment under the constraint of keeping delinquency at a maximal tolerable level. This level is exogenously determined. JEL classification: K14