At the heart of the Bitcoin is a blockchain protocol, a protocol for achieving consensus on a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. To the extent that a blockchain protocol is used for applications such as contract signing and making certain transactions (such as house sales) public, we need to understand what guarantees the protocol gives us in terms of agents’ knowledge. Here, we p...

Legal reasoning is one application of large-scale knowledge information processing, where arti cial intelligence, natural language processing, databases and other technologies are integrated. From the database point of view, legal reasoning requires access to vast data and knowledge sources such as written law and unwritten law. Because it is di cult for a person to deal with such amounts of le...

The lack of land ownership can discourage agricultural technology adoption, yet there is scarce evidence of the impact of land rental contracts on the adoption of improved crop varieties in developing countries. The current study investigates such impact using a nationally representative survey of Ethiopian maize farmers. In contrast to many previous studies, we show in a simple model that cash...

Channel rebates and returns policies are common mechanisms for manufacturers to entice retailers to increase their order quantities and sales ultimately. However, when the underlying demand depends on the retail price, it has been known that channel coordination cannot be achieved if only one of these mechanisms is deployed. In this paper, we show that a policy that combines the use of wholesal...

This survey identifies and defines innovative contracting mechanisms developed in the Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region and northern California. A survey of nine case studies reveals that several new mechanisms have facilitated ecosystem management, quality jobs, and administrative efficiencies, but at times innovation was hampered by Forest Service institutional structures and downsizing...

π The contents of this paper in part or in whole are entirely those of the authors and do not represent the views and opinions of Sasin of Chulalongkorn University, Ministry of Finance and any organization associated with the authors. Comments are welcome. All correspondence is directed to Project Summary Findings 1. Tourism contributes 6% of Thailand's GDP at 323.5 billion Baht – increasing at...

I study a pro…t-maximizing monopolist selling a durable good to buyers who arrive over time. Buyers are forward looking and their values for the good evolve stochastically. I …rst suppose that the seller commits to a path of posted prices in a stationary environment. Contrary to the case where values remain constant, optimal prices ‡uctuate over time. This is consistent with the use of sales or...

This question received a powerful impetus with the publication of Stewart Macaulay’s pioneering study in 1963 into the use of contract law in the market place. Macaulay looked at the contracting practices of businesses in Wisconsin and found that many entered into agreements that didn’t satisfy the requirements of contract law and would not, therefore, be enforceable in the courts – and that th...

This paper considers a multiple-supplier, single manufacturer assembly supply chain where the suppliers produce components of a short life-cycle product which is assembled by the manufacturer. In this single-period problem the suppliers determine their production quantities and the manufacturer chooses the retail price. We assume that the manufacturer faces a random pricedependent demand in eit...

We examine how consumers and financial markets in the United States reacted to two health warnings about mad cow disease: the first discovery of an infected cow in December 2003 and an Oprah Winfrey show that aired seven years earlier on the potentially harmful effects of mad cow disease. We find a pronounced and significant reduction in beef sales following the first discovery of an infected c...