Why Obey?

Why People Obey the Law: Experimental Evidence from the Provision of Public Goods

According to economists, severe legal sanctions deter violations of the law. According to legal scholars, people may obey law backed by mild sanctions because of norm-activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild and severe legal sanctions in the provision of public goods. The results show that severe sanctions almost perfectly deter free-riding. However, people also obey law ba...

The Duty to Obey the Law

Under what conditions, if any, do those the law addresses have a moral duty or obligation to obey it simply because it is the law? Political and legal theorists since Plato have developed a wide range of answers to this question, as well as numerous objections to those answers. This essay aims primarily to provide the newcomer with a point of entry into the debate over the existence and grounds...

Finite-state Markov Chains Obey Benford's Law

A sequence ofreal numbers (xn) is Benford if the significands, i.e., the fraction parts in the floating-point representation of (x ), are distributed logarithmically. Similarly, a discrete-time irreducible and aperiodic fi­ n nite-state Markov chain with transition probability matrix P and limiting matrix P' is Benford if every com­ ponent of both sequences of matrices (pn P') and (pn+1 pn) is ...

The Obligation to Obey: Revision and Tradition

Generating network topologies that obey power laws

Recent studies have shown that Internet graphs and other network systems follow power-laws. Do artiicial network topologies commonly used in network simulation studies obey these power-laws? In this paper we show that current topology generators do not obey all of the power-laws, and we present two new topology generators that do. Finally, we re-evaluate a multicast study to demonstrate the imp...