Spying on the environment.

DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER SERIES Spying in Multi-market Oligopolies

We consider a multimarket framework where a set of firms compete on two interrelated oligopolistic markets. Prior to competing in these markets, firms can spy on others in order to increase the quality of their product. We characterize the equilibrium espionage networks and networks that maximize social welfare under the most interesting scenario of diseconomies of scope. We find that in some s...

Spying as an Object-Oriented Programming Paradigm

We introduce spying, a novel way of programming with objects, based on capsule programming and reflective facilities. This programming style allows easy building of monitoring systems, such as tracers, debuggers. We point out three main problems related to this programming style, and propose practical solutions to some of them. We exemplify our claims with a system that performs master/slave co...

Spying on Cancer with PET Scans

Spying with the Crowd

The cooperative power of crowd workers has been recently shown to be effective in solving large-scale diverse tasks. We elaborately study one such application of collaborative crowdsourcing. In this paper, we discuss the viability and different facets of crowdspying, activity of spying with the power of crowd workers. This type of citizen involvement has diverse applications that also includes ...

Nota Di Lavoro 117 . 2010

We consider a multimarket framework where a set of firms compete on two interrelated oligopolistic markets. Prior to competing in these markets, firms can spy on others in order to increase the quality of their product. We characterize the equilibrium espionage networks and networks that maximize social welfare under the most interesting scenario of diseconomies of scope. We find that in some s...

The Economic Costs of Mass Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany

The Economic Costs of Mass Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany* Based on official records from the former East German Ministry for State Security, we quantify the long-term costs of state surveillance on social capital and economic performance. Using county-level variation in the spy density in the 1980s, we exploit discontinuities at state borders to show that higher level...