Situational Methods Engineering aims to provide different approaches for constructing methods in function of projects on which they will be applied. One of the major issues in this area is to convince the professionals of the utility of such approaches. Indeed, companies are generally convinced that these approaches are too complex and too timeand resource-consuming. The method family concept h...

How can formal methods be applied to philosophical problems that involve informal concepts of ordinary language? Carnap answered this question by describing a methodology that he called “explication.” Strawson objected that explication changes the subject and does not address the original philosophical problem; this paper shows that Carnap’s response to that objection was inadequate and offers ...

Previous studies of the marital fertility transition in Europe have found religious differentials. Using data collected from the population registers of The Hague, our aim in this study is to search for answers to the following questions: whether religious differentials result from socio-economic characteristics; to what extent religious ideology explains the behaviour of religious groups; whic...

In the past few years, a body of ideas based on political economy theory has been built up by North and Weingast, Olson, Przeworski, and Acemoglu and Robinson. One theme that emerges from this literature concerns the transition to democracy: why would dominant elites give up oligarchic power? This article addresses this question by considering a formal model of an authoritarian regime, and then...

T paper uses a formal model to study how evaluation costs affect competition for resources in strategic factor markets. It finds that relative scarcity may not always benefit resource sellers. Rather, when competition among resource investors passes a certain threshold intensity, miscoordination among investors increases to the point that sellers’ expected profits decline. This paper extends th...

We propose considering the problem of electronic cash i n the context of a network in which anonymous, untraceable commiinicatlon is assumed to be possible. We present a formal model for such a network, and define security criteria for an electronic cash system in such a setting. Finally, we show that there exists a remarkably simple electrortic cash system which meets the security criteria of ...

The ability to practice contraception is essential to protecting Ethiopian women's health and enables them to plan the size and timing of their families. Yet low levels of contraceptive use have led to high levels of unintended pregnancy in Ethiopia, a problem for which women and society pay dearly-in women's lives, family well-being and public funds.