Disclaimer: This report was produced under the EU Health Programme (2008-2013) in the frame of a service contract with the Consumers, Health, Agriculture and Food Executive Agency (Chafea) under the mandate from the European Commission. The content of this report represents the views of the contractor and is its sole responsibility; it can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European...

In the operation of a health care system, defining the limits of medical care is the joint responsibility of many parties including clinicians, patients, philosophers and politicians. It is suggested that changes in the potential for prolonging life make it necessary to give doctors guidance which may have to incorporate certain features of utilitarianism, individualism and patient-autonomy.

We explore to what extent we can propose …xed negotiation rules as well as simple mechanisms (or protocols) that guarantee that political parties can form stable coalition-governments. We analyze the case where three parties can hold o¢ ce in the form of two-party coalitions. We de…ne the family of Weighted Rules, that select political agreements as a function of the bliss-points of the parties...

Electronic contract signing allows two potentially dis-trustful parties to digitally sign an electronic document “simultaneously” across a network. Existing solutions for electronic contract signing either require the involvement of a trusted third party (TTP), or are complex and expensive in communication and computation. In this paper we propose an electronic contract signing protocol between...

One of the major security aspects in mobile communication networks concerns information about the localization of the (mobile) network user. This information may be protected by establishing a trusted third party that is responsible for creating suitable pseudonyms for the user identity. Distributing the maintenance of pseudonyms among n independent trusted parties allows to increase further th...

This paper is about a critical component of the Web ecosystem that has so far received little attention in our community: ad exchanges. They run auctions to sell publishers’ inventory—space on a Web page—to advertisers who want to display ads in those spaces. Unfortunately, under the status quo, the parties to the auction cannot check that an auction was carried out correctly, which raises the ...

In one of the most ambitious forms of environmental decision-making, representatives of interested parties – environmentalists, developers, farmers, loggers, miners, etc. are charged with the responsibility of developing a set of public policies that is acceptable to all of them. Although this approach has become increasingly popular, and has been widely discussed in the academic literature, li...

In recent years, increased attention has been paid to issues of responsibility across the entire product lifecycle. Responsible behaviour of organizations in the product chain is dependent on the actions of other parties such as suppliers and customers. Only through co-operation and close interaction between the different parties involved is it possible to come to a specified form of responsibl...

Responsibility is not a choice but a burden. That is the basic intuition that we will put forward in this book. Why would parties embrace a policy that is not preferred by a majority of voters and surrender the electoral chances of their candidates? Electorally unsuccessful but responsible parties, it is said, cultivate brand names today by promising policies that voters may prefer in the futur...

Our purpose is to investigate auditor independence by developing a model that includes both financial and nonfinancial incentives and to test this model using an experiment. We develop the Gatekeeper Game: a three player game, where a gatekeeper makes a decision that affects the wealth of two parties (a proposer and a third party) who have conflicting interests. We find that gatekeepers represe...