(Re)Organizing legitimacy theory

A Theory of Legitimacy

We develop a formal theory of legitimate collective choice. In our theory a policy choice is legitimate if the process through which the final choice was determined is consistent with some principle that can be used to (perhaps partially) rank the potential policy choices. The set of principles in any choice situation is taken to be exogenous, but a decision-making process is defined so as to d...

A Utilitarian Theory of Political Legitimacy

Although the burgeoning discipline of welfare economics is based on essentially utilititarian principles, the foundations of utilitarianism have received little attention in recent years. This paper seeks to reopen the debate by drawing a distinction between Harsanyi’s two defences of utilitarianism, labeling the first a teleological or ideal-observer theory, and the second a nonteleological th...

Reorganizing Large Web Sites

Reorganizing UNIX for Reliability

In this paper, we discuss the architecture of a modular UNIX-compatible operating system, MINIX 3, that provides reliability beyond that of most other systems. With nearly the entire operating system running as a set of user-mode servers and drivers atop a minimal kernel, the system is fully compartmentalized. By moving most of the code to unprivileged user-mode processes and restricting the po...

Reorganizing Workflow Evolution Provenance

The provenance of related computations presents the opportunity to better understand and explore the differences and similarities of various approaches. As users design and refine workflows, evolution provenance captures the relationships between workflows as actions that mutate one workflow to another. However, such provenance may not always be the most compact or intuitive. This paper present...