Black women living with HIV (BWLWH) contend injuries of injustice, which manifest in restricted reproductive autonomy and decision-making power social medical settings. Mitigating threats to calls for innovations that consider patients' needs offer insights on how historically situated marginalization influences today's institutional, political, economic systems shapes decision making. In addit...

In this paper, we argue that allowing self-interested agents to activate social institutions during runtime can improve the robustness (i.e., stability, reliability, or scalability) of open multiagent systems (MAS). Referring to sociological theory, we consider institutions to be rules that need to be activated and adopted by the agent population during runtime and propose a framework for self-...

Rapid urbanisation in the reform period has resulted in a very high demand for basic urban infrastructure in China. Improving its provision by the public sector is a challenge as problems persist in the form of unmet demand, de® ciencies in cost recover y and inadequate maintenance. Institutional hurdles, particularly the lack of organisational and ® nancial autonomy for the providers of urban ...

The monitoring of ambient environmental conditions is essential to environmental management and regulation. However, effective monitoring is subject to a range of institutional, political, and legal constraints, constraints that are a product of the need for monitoring to be continuous, long lived, and well matched to the resources being studied. Political pressure or myopia, conflicting agency...

Institutional Effects in a Simple Model of Educational Production The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government chooses educational spending to maximi...

This article explores the impact of student self-financing systems on inequalities of access to higher education (HE) through comparative analysis of two national systems, those of England and Australia. The analysis of the historical development of HE in each nation identifies a set of comparative global themes: the expansion of higher education in response to the needs of the national economy...

The author's right to a secondary publication (in addition to a first publication in a commercial journal of the author ́s choice) is discussed from the perspective of the different actors in scientific publication markets. The challenge for a copyright regulation of this right becomes even more complex because it is seen by many as indirectly, if not directly fostering the open access paradigm....

In addressing Third World housing problems, the voluntary sector, characterized by voluntarism and community involvement, plays a crucial role in filling the gaps left by the public and private sectors. Although the voluntary sector is more flexible than public bureaucracy and is not constrained by profit-making goals of the private sector, it suffers from voluntary failure and faces accountabi...

abstract background: one of the important factors in the prediction of family planning outcome is paying attention to women’s role in decision making concerning fertility and household affairs. with the improvement of women’s status and autonomy, their control over fertility is expected to increase. the present study aimed to investigate the association between women’s autonomy and family plann...