“Privacy by default” is being discussed as one important principle for ICT system design. This principle has been taken up as “data protection by default” in the proposal for a European Data Protection Regulation published in 2012. However, it is debated what this principle should mean in practice. In this text, we analyze the relation to “security by default” and “privacy by design” and discus...

Uptime-guarantee maintenance contracts reflect the obligation of service providers to maintain full functionality of equipment in certain fractions of working time in a period. In this paper, we study the optimal design of uptime-guarantee contracts for a service provider who does not know the customer’s exact valuation for having the equipment up and running per unit of working time. We first ...

This paper is mainly based on the work done in the ESPRIT project ECIP2, Ref. #2072, on high-level system speci cation [LEB91, MUE90]. The goal within this work was rst to enlighten the main streams and activities during the very early phases of contract-oriented high-level system design and speci cation. Second, based on the rst evaluation, the applicability of the IEEE standard hardware descr...

We argue that enforcement costs, ignored in the literature on ‘efficient breach’, are important for the choice of contract breach remedy. Empirically we find that specific performance is almost never claimed in Civil Law countries. It involves forcing a party in breach to perform actions while damages involves extracting only a monetary payment. The former is more difficult and more coercive. W...

There are some application domains to which it appears intrinsically challenging to introduce the services offered by formal engineering methods. This paper is an evidence-based presentation that lightweight formal methods are effective in building realistic networked multiplayer games. The evidence is produced via a pilot study that uses Design-by-Contract, under realistic game development con...

Since independence, different institutional arrangements have been tried to reorganize the land and production relations for bringing change in farming systems and enhancing crop yield of small farmers. But, these interventions have not been successful in bringing any meaningful improvement. Non-viability of small landholdings, inadequacies in the availability of inputs, poor extension and infr...

We analyze an oligopolistic microcredit market characterized by asymmetric information and institutions that can offer only one type of contract. We study the effects of competition on contract choice when small entrepreneurs can borrow from more than one institution due to the absence of credit bureaus. We show that appropriate contract design can eliminate the ex-ante incentives for multiple ...

In developing countries markets for agri-food products are changing at a pace that is unparalleled in modern history. Markets are increasingly open and increasingly homogenized toward international tastes and requirements for levels of quality, packaging, safety, and even process attributes such as socially or environmentally friendly methods. New distribution channels, dominated by larger firm...

We introduce the multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, solve it analytically, and discuss how it generalizes a vast class of continuous-time and discretetime multivariate processes. Relying on the simple geometrical interpretation of the dynamics of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process we introduce cointegration and its relationship to statistical arbitrage. We illustrate an application to swap co...