“Strong” political parties within legislatures are one possible solution to the problem of inefficient universalism, a norm under which all legislators seek large projects for their districts that are paid for out of a common pool. We demonstrate that even if parties have no role in the legislature, their role in elections can be sufficient to reduce spending. If parties in the electorate are s...

In this paper, a secure prepaid micropayment protocol which is suitable for wireless networks is introduced. The proposed protocol employs a secure cryptographic technique that reduces all parties’ computation and satisfies transaction security properties, including non-repudiation. This offers the ability to resolve disputes among parties. Compared to existing micropayment protocols, all parti...

People’s cultural background has been shown to affect the way they reach agreements in negotiation and how they fulfill these agreements. This paper presents a novel agent design for negotiating with people from different cultures. Our setting involved an alternating-offer protocol that allowed parties to choose the extent to which they kept each of their agreements during the negotiation. A ch...

Investing in the education of girls may well be the highest return investment available in the developing world. As such, increasing the level of female education is an especially high priority in Pakistan. This economist has examined the links between women's education and development, and argues on several fronts in support of educating girls. Worldwide, female children suffer higher level...

The current multi-stakeholder process to define the Do Not Track standard has considered inputs from many parties, including browser vendors, network advertisers, privacy researchers, and the government. However, we feel that average users, the millions of people who will be directly affected by a Do Not Track standard, have been underrepresented. These are the users whose information is collec...

How do politicians in emerging democracies subvert institutional reforms that are designed to improve accountability? Looking at patron-client relations within political parties, I present a strategy, partisan accountability, by which strong parties undermine accountability citizens. At the national level, build patronage networks. Central party organizations use their power and resources machi...

We develop an approach to utilize anisotropic metamaterials to solve one of the fundamental problems of modern plasmonics--parasitic scattering of surface waves into free-space modes, opening the road to truly two-dimensional plasmonic optics. We illustrate the developed formalism on the examples of plasmonic refractor and plasmonic crystal, and discuss limitations of the developed technique an...