due to its critical impact and significant destructive nature during and after seismic events, soil liquefaction and liquefactioninduced lateral ground spreading have been increasingly important topics in the geotechnical earthquake engineering field during the past four decades. the aim of this research is to develop an empirical model for the assessment of liquefaction-induced lateral ground ...

Limited observability is the assumption that economic agents can only observe a finite amount of information. Given this constraint, contracts among agents are necessarily finite and incomplete in comparison to the ideal complete contract that we model as infinite in detail. We consider the extent to which finite contracts can approximate the idealized complete contracts. The objectives of the ...

This article examines the development of profitor revenue-sharing contracts in the motion picture industry. Contrary to much popular belief, such contracts have been in use since the start of the studio era. However, early contracts differed from those seen today. The evolution of the current contract is traced, and evidence regarding the increased use of sharing contracts after 1948 is examine...

We propose a simple event calculus representation of contracts and a reactive belief-desire-intention agent architecture to enable the monitoring and execution of contract terms and conditions. We use the event calculus to deduce current and past obligations, obligation fulfilment and violation. By associating meta-information with the contracts, the agent is able to select which of its contrac...

Contracts that reference rivals have long been a focus of antitrust law and the subject of intense scholarly debate. This paper compares two such contracts, exclusive-dealing contracts and market-share contracts, in a model of naked exclusion. We discuss the different mechanisms through which each works and identify the fundamental tradeoff that arises: marketshare contracts are better at maxim...

Zirconium tetra(tert-butoxide) reacts with surface amide groups of polyamide nylon 6/6 to give (eta(2)-amidate)zirconium complexes in high yield. These surface complexes react to bond the cell-adhesive peptide arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) to the polymer surface. A surface loading of 0.18 nmol/cm(2) of RGD is achieved, which is 20-1000 times higher than previously reported attainable on ...

Several systems can be modeled as sets of interdependent networks where each network contains distinct nodes. Diffusion processes like the spreading of a disease or the propagation of information constitute fundamental phenomena occurring over such coupled networks. In this paper we propose a new concept of multidimensional epidemic threshold characterizing diffusion processes over interdepende...

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Bitcoin has attracted everyone’s attention and interest recently. Ethereum (ETH), a second generation cryptocurrency, extends Bitcoin’s design by offering a Turing-complete programming language called Solidity to develop smart contracts. Smart contracts allow creditable execution of contracts on EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) without third parties. Developing correct smart contracts is challeng...