Social categorization is an early-developing feature of human social cognition, yet the role that social categories play in children's understanding of and predictions about human behavior has been unclear. In the studies reported here, we tested whether a foundational functional role of social categories is to mark people as intrinsically obligated to one another (e.g., obligated to protect ra...

human rights are the basic standards that people need to live in dignity.  in addition to the rights that are available to all people, there are rights that apply only to children.  children need special rights because of their unique needs;  they need additional protection that adults don’t.  the united nations convention on the rights of the child is an international document that sets out al...

Societies constrain the behavior of agents by imposing multiple, often contradictory, obligations and interdictions amongst them. To work in harmony, agents must find ways to satisfy these constraints, or to break less important ones when necessary. In this paper I , we present a solution to this problem based on a representation of obligations and interdictions in an organizational framework, ...

In this paper we address the problem of collective agency, and propose a deontic/action modal logic for that purpose. We argue that once we want to attribute obligations (permissions or other deontic notions) to a set of agents, we need to consider a new agent – an institutionalized agent, and specify how he interacts with the external world: how the obligations flow from the institutionalized ...

Access control is concerned with granting access to sensitive data based on conditions that relate to the past or present, so-called provisions. Expressing requirements from the domain of data protection necessitates extending this notion with conditions that relate to the future. Obligations, in this sense, are concerned with commitments of the involved parties. At the moment of granting acces...

Policies are widely used in modern systems and applications. Recently, it has been recognized that simple decisions are just not enough for many systems and applications. Many policies require actions to be performed after a decision is made in accordance with the policy. To address this need, this paper studies the notions of obligations, which are those conditions or actions that must be full...

This paper examines whether the disclosure of purchase obligations in the MD&A section of 10-K filings provides useful information to investors. Firms are predicted to enter into additional purchase obligations when they expect an increase in demand for their products. As such, growth in purchase obligations is predicted to be associated with higher future sales and earnings. The evidence is co...