Although the management of information assets—specifically, of text documents that make up 80 percent of these assets— an provide organizations with a competitive advantage, the ability of information retrieval (IR) systems to deliver relevant information to users is severely hampered by the difficulty of disambiguating natural language. The word ambiguity problem is addressed with moderate suc...

Feature request management systems are popular tools for gathering and negotiating stakeholders’ change requests during system evolution. While these frameworks encourage stakeholder participation in distributed software development, their lack of structure also raises challenges. We present a study of requirements defects and failures in large scale feature request management systems, which we...

Illegal extraction of forest resources is fought, in many developing countries, by patrols that try to make this activity less profitable, using the threat of confiscation. With a limited budget, officials will try to distribute the patrols throughout the forest intelligently, in order to most effectively limit extraction. Prior work in forest economics has formalized this as a Stackelberg game...

Recent years have seen a push to use explicit consideration of “value” in order to drive design. This paper conveys the need to explicitly align perspectives on “value” with the method used to quantify “value.” Various concepts of value are introduced in the context of its evolution within economics in order to propose a holistic definition of value. Operationalization of value is discussed, in...

The use of contingent valuation (CV) methods to estimate benefits has become increasingly common in project analysis. Ever since the NOAA Blue Ribbon Panel Report in 1993 (NOAA, 1993) recommended the use of the referendum form of CV, it seems to have become the method of choice in practical settings. Referendum-type questions are thought to be easier to answer than the open-ended variety. But t...

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 revealed many inadequacies in the pre-crisis approach to financial stability regulation. In the United States, Congress responded by enacting the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The Act calls for government agencies to make numerous rules regulating activities that have the potential to harm financial stability, but there has been no ...