A society needs to decide which issues (laws, public projects, public facilities, etc.) in an agenda to accept. The decision can be any subset of the agenda but must reflect the preferences of its members, which are assumed to be “separable weak orderings”. We characterize a family of plurality-like rules based on strategy-proofness, restricted efficiency, anonymity, and two weak axioms pertain...

We assess the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 on corporate investment in an investment Euler equation framework, where a dummy for the passage of the Act is allowed to affect the rate at which managers discount future investment payoffs. Using generalized method of moments estimators, we find that the rate U.S. firm managers apply to discount investment projects rises significantly aft...

Dummy-based anonymization techniques for protecting the location privacy of mobile users have appeared in the literature. By generating dummies that move in humanlike trajectories, this approach shows that the location privacy of mobile users can be preserved. However, the trajectories of mobile users can still be exposed by monitoring the long-term movement patterns of users. We argue that, on...

The literature contains a variety of different mixes, some of which have been used in deployed anonymity systems. We explore their anonymity and message delay properties, and show how to mount active attacks against them by altering the traffic between the mixes. We show that if certain mixes are used, such attacks cannot destroy the anonymity of a particular message completely. We work out the...

We provide a new and concise characterization of the Banzhaf value on the (linear) space of all TU-games on a fixed player set by means of two transparent axioms. The first one is the wellknown Dummy player axiom. The second axiom, called Strong transfer invariance, indicates that a player’s payoff is invariant to a transfer of worth between two coalitions he or she belongs to. To prove this re...

This paper analyzes the effects of socio-economic factors on life expectancy. Using multiple regression analysis, the paper shows that there is a positive strong correlation between life expectancy as an independent variable and per capita income, health expenditures, literacy rate and daily calorie intake. Also, it shows that there is a negative strong correlation between life expectancy and n...

This paper considers the nonparametric identification and estimation of the average effect of a dummy endogenous variable in nonseparable models. The analysis includes the case of a dummy endogenous variable in a discrete choice model as a special case. This paper establishes conditions under which it is possible to identify and consistently estimate the average effect of the dummy endogenous v...