Participatory development has become, ‘development orthodoxy’, receiving widespread proclamations of support from foreign aid agencies. engages international beneficiaries in making decisions about project activity selection and design. Yet, many donors deliver assistance through top-down, highly controlled systems that may constrain the flexibility needed to delegate decision-making power bene...

Outcome-based contracting (OBC) seeks to improve public services by paying for service outcomes rather than activities. This article explores the link between how are contractually specified and much is paid their achievement. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we test a framework assessing strength of outcome specifications in 34 UK-based social impact bonds, particular form OBC...

Fundamentally, the development of software applications involves dealing with two distinct domains: the real world and software domains; the two converge at the point where a software application is used to make an unsatisfactory real world situation into a satisfactory one. Thus, software application development is a problem solving activity that assumes a problem has been identified and a sof...

The definition of what is being auctioned should cover all the specifications and incentives that govern the concession, whether they are included in the concession contract or in laws, regulations, or elsewhere. Where concessions are new, concession contracts may run to hundreds of pages and several volumes, as in the case of the Buenos Aires water concession. In France, by contrast, a long tr...

Real time interrogation and analysis of coal makes it possible to quickly respond to changing conditions and efficiently control coal quality closely to meet operational or contractual specifications. Real time measurement systems generally include an online analyzer, an integrated mechanical sampling system for calibration of the analyzer and for collecting shipment or daily contract samples, ...

Recent work in communications and business modeling emphasizes a commitment-based view of interaction. By abstracting away from implementation-level details, commitments can potentially enhance perspicuity during modeling and flexibility during enactment. We address the problem of creating commitment-based specifications that directly capture business requirements, yet apply in distributed sett...

Divorce law changes made in the 1970s affected marital formation, dissolution, and bargaining within marriage. By altering the terms of the marital contract these legal changes impacted the incentives for women to enter and remain in the labor force. Whereas earlier work had suggested that the impact of unilateral divorce on female employment depended critically on laws governing property divis...

A Markov model is constructed for studying the counterparty risk in a CDS contract. The ‘wrong-way risk’ in this model is accounted for by the possibility of the common default of the reference name and of the counterparty. A dynamic copula property as well as affine model specifications make pricing and calibration very efficient. We also consider the issue of dynamically hedging the CVA with ...

Divorce law changes made in the 1970s affected marital formation, dissolution, and bargaining within marriage. By altering the terms of the marital contract these legal changes impacted the incentives for women to enter and remain in the labor force. Whereas earlier work had suggested that the impact of unilateral divorce on female employment depended critically on laws governing property divis...