“Third Parties” and Democracy 2.0

Political Parties and Democracy

A central claim of democratic theory is that democracy induces governments to be responsive to the preferences of the people. Political parties organize politics in every modern democracy, and some observers claim that parties are what induce democracies to be responsive. Yet, according to others, parties give voice to extremists and reduce the responsiveness of governments to the citizenry. Th...

Contracting with Third Parties

odels of bilateral contracting, such as the canonical holdup model, typically assume that third parties are not available. Given this assumption, the equilibrium outcome is not first-best efficient if contracts can be renegotiated. To be more specific, suppose an architect and a builder must cooperate to build a building. The quality of the building will depend on three things: the quality of t...

Towards Tiny Trusted Third Parties

Many security protocols hypothesize the existence of a trusted third party (TTP) to ease handling of computation and data too sensitive for the other parties involved. Subsequent discussion usually dismisses these protocols as hypothetical or impractical, under the assumption that trusted third parties cannot exist. However, the last decade has seen the emergence of hardware-based devices that,...

Exploitable Results by Third Parties

Whose Duties and Liabilities to Third Parties?