Large-scale rumor spreading could pose severe social and economic damages. The emergence of online social networks along with the new media can even make rumor spreading more severe. Effective control of rumor spreading is of theoretical and practical significance. This paper takes the first step to understand how the blockchain technology can help limit the spread of rumors. Specifically, we d...

The explosion of online social networking (OSN) in recent years has caused damages to organisations due to leakage of information by their employees. Employees’ social networking behaviour, whether accidental or intentional, provides an opportunity for advanced persistent threats (APT) attackers to realise their social engineering techniques and undetectable zero-day exploits. APT attackers use...

Alcohol abuse is a serious medical and social problem. Although light to moderate alcohol consumption is beneficial to cardiovascular health, heavy drinking often results in organ damage and social problems. In addition, genetic susceptibility to the effect of alcohol on cancer and coronary heart disease differs across the population. A number of mechanisms including direct the toxicity of etha...

This paper compares the optimal environmental tax to marginal social damages (MSD) in a second-best setting with preexisting taxes using both analytical and numerical models. The optimal environmental tax is found generally to exceed MSD and to rise with increased revenue requirements – a relationship which holds for both productivity externalities and amenity externalities. The simple logic fo...

On March 11, 2011, an 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck the northeast coast of Japan. Even more devastating was the tsunami that followed the earthquake. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and numerous forms of social infrastructure, such as roads and dams, were destroyed. The death toll exceeded 86,000, more than 13,000 were listed as missing, and 550,000 people had to evacuate the region. The s...

Social and economic damages are the most important damages of the bridge failure. Stability problems of such structures against failure and the depth of the abutments are directly related to the amount of the adjusted scour. Economy, reliability and stability have been main concerns regarding designing abutment bridges enhanced preventing scouring. In this study a detailed comparison of the up-...

The sensitivity of the optimal control of carbon dioxide emissions to the specification of the social welfare function is systematically explored using the FUND model. Increasing risk aversion emphasises climate change damages relative to emission reduction costs, but at the same time increases the discount rate of consumption. Without international co-operation, the discount rate effect domina...