In the emerging model of 21st century electronic commerce, a variety of open agent marketplaces will be competing with one another for participants. The most successful marketplaces will be those that provide the best “quality of service” guarantees (in terms of security, fairness, efficiency, etc.), while meeting such challenges as agent heterogeneity, limited trust, and potential for systemic...

Civil war is very common in the developing world, with harmful welfare effects when it occurs. Many fear that the devastation wrought by violent conflict destroys social capital, impedes economic development, and leads to the recurrence of violence (Paul Collier et al. 2003). In response, donors are injecting large amounts of aid into post-conflict countries. A significant share of this assista...

Scholars of insanity and its historical antecedents have paid very little attention to personal and institutional clothing. Such dress, distributed to patients in mental institutions, has always been inscribed with the conflicting narratives of the period in which it was made and worn. The language of civil and medical authority is more evident than personal choice in the shape and address of t...

Key institutions of the pre-modern Middle Eastern economy, all grounded in Islamic law, blocked the development of democratic institutions. This talk identifies three mechanisms that played critical roles. Islam's original tax system failed to produce lasting and credible constraints on governance. The waqfs (Islamic trusts) founded to provide social services to designated constituencies were p...

The creation of open agent-mediated electronic marketplaces requires new architectures, capable of coping with unreliable computational and network infrastructures, limited trust among independently developed agents, and the possibility of systemic failures. In analogy with civil human societies, open marketplaces will benefit from the introduction of appropriate electronic social institutions,...

In a polarized political setting, public policy evolves in response to pressures on and from institutions. These institutions include broad social structures, formal organizations (such as regulatory agencies), and support systems (like civil service). This study uses water and sanitation policies in Bolivia to illustrate how institutional reform at all three levels lacked legitimacy in the eye...

South African popular movement analysts and activists participating in African and international civil society meetings on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other multilateral institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, are frequently faced with troubled and troubling questions about the position that the South African government has taken, and what is seen to be the highly questiona...

the last decade of the twentieth century saw the rise of a great number of regimes that cannot be easily classified as either authoritarian or democratic but display some characteristics of both—in short, they are semi-authoritarian regimes. They are ambiguous systems that combine rhetorical acceptance of liberal democracy, the existence of some formal democratic institutions, and respect for a...