While the effects of legal and institutional arrangements on political participation are well documented, little attention has been given to the potential participatory effects of one of the United States’ most important electoral laws: constitutionally mandated reapportionment. By severing the ties between constituents and their incumbents, we argue, redistricting raises information costs, lea...

In a heterogeneous society with two social groups possessing competing social norms, members of the relatively worse-off group face an incentive to adopt the social norms of the better-off group and assimilate into it. I present a theory in which the cost of assimilation is endogenous and strategically chosen by the better-off group in order to screen those who wish to assimilate. In equilibriu...

We propose a construction for nonlinear off-shell gauge field theories based on a constrained system quantized in the sense of deformation quantization. The key idea is to consider the star-product BFV–BRST master equation as an equation of motion. The construction is formulated in terms of the BRST extention of the unfolded formalism that can also be understood as an appropriate generalization...

the industrial design is a two or three-dimensional aesthetic creation related to industrial products. according to the definition of the iranian law, for the realization of the legal protection of industrial designs there are three necessary components: combine lines or colors, runs on industrial products and change product appearance. in iran, only the registered designs are supported. while ...

T paper introduces a method to measure regret theory, a popular theory of decision under uncertainty. Regret theory allows for violations of transitivity, and it may seem paradoxical to quantitatively measure an intransitive theory. We adopt the trade-off method and show that it is robust to violations of transitivity. Our method makes no assumptions about the shape of the functions reflecting ...

We present a unified point of view on the different methods available in the literature to extract gauge theory renormalization constants from the lowenergy limit of string theory. The Bern-Kosower method, based on an off-shell continuation of string theory amplitudes, and the construction of low-energy string theory effective actions for gauge particles, can both be understood in terms of stri...

We discuss a universality property of any covariant field theory in space-time expanded around pp-wave backgrounds. According to this property the space-time lagrangian density evaluated on a restricted set of field configurations, called universal sector, turns out to be same around all the pp-waves, even off-shell, with same transverse space and same profiles for the background scalars. In th...