This paper examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre-emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata (soslovii) to engage in a wide variety of co...

We consider a general shuffling operation for finite and infinite words which is not necessarily fair. This means that it may be the case that in a shuffle of two words, from some point onwards, one of these words prevails ad infinitum even though the other word still has letters to contribute. Prefixes and limits of shuffles are investigated, leading to a characterization of general shuffles i...

Citation: Dalmaijer ES, Nijenhuis BG and Van der Stigchel S (2016) Commentary: Life is unfair, and so are racing sports: some athletes can randomly benefit from alerting effects due to inconsistent starting procedures. Front. Psychol. 7:119. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00119 Commentary: Life is unfair, and so are racing sports: some athletes can randomly benefit from alerting effects due to inconsi...