Arrow’s celebrated theorem shows that the aggregation of individuals’ preferences into a social ordering cannot make the ranking of any pair of alternatives depend only on individuals’ preferences over that pair, unless the fundamental Pareto and non-dictatorship principles are violated. In a unified approach covering the theory of social choice and the theory of fair allocation, we investigate...

LOTOS is a speciication language, but it is not very useful without a design methodology that describes the process from initial speciication construction to implementation. In this paper we discuss the tools to support such a design process. The language, method and tools are beginning to be used in realistic applications, but the research on them continues. This paper concentrates on the curr...

The emergent field of animal linguistics applies tools to data in order investigate potential linguistic-like properties their communication. One these is the “Urgency Principle”, a pragmatic principle stating that an alarm sequence, calls providing information about nature or location threat must come before those do not. This theoretical has helped understand system putty-nosed monkeys, but w...

Automated termination provers often use the following schema to prove that a program terminates: construct a relational abstraction of the program’s transition relation and then show that the relational abstraction is wellfounded. The focus of current tools has been on developing sophisticated techniques for constructing the abstractions while relying on known decidable logics (such as linear a...

This paper is an attempt to examine the main theorems of social choice theory from the viewpoint of constructive mathematics. We examine the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem [A.F. Gibbard, Manipulation of voting schemes: a general result, Econometrica 41 (1973) 587–601; M.A. Satterthwaite, Strategyproofness and Arrow’s conditions: existence and correspondence theorems for voting procedures and soc...

This qualitative research examines propinquity across two grocery shopping situations – real (in-store) and virtual (online). Examining how the same consumers shop for the same or similar commodities provides quasi-experimental conditions to examine differences in shopping behaviour. Convergent interviews with 15 respondents identified that consumer reasons – expectations of convenience, trust ...

For constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), Haralick & Elliott [1] introduced the Fail-First Principle and defined in it terms of minimizing branch depth. By devising a range of variable ordering heuristics, each in turn trying harder to fail first, Smith & Grant [2] showed that adherence to this strategy does not guarantee reduction in search effort. The present work builds on Smith & Grant. ...

We present a logic for reasoning about LOTOS behaviours which allows properties involving repeated patterns over actions and data to be expressed The semantics of the logic is given with respect to sym bolic transition systems Several motivational examples are included The reader is assumed to have passing familiarity with LOTOS