Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is a rapidly growing field of international law, due mainly to a proliferation of investment treaties among states that grant foreign investors the right to pursue binding arbitration against states for alleged violations of property rights. However, many have argued that poorer countries are systematically disadvantaged in arbitration since the costs of...

While much attention has been given to reputation mechanisms to deter fraudulent behavior in online auctions, we know little about the nature of disputes or the types of problems that users face. This is an exploratory analysis of 129 disputes for six different types of products that were sold on eBay. In the descriptive and multinomial analysis, we find eight different types of disputes includ...

Networked systems often consist of inter-dependent subsystems that are governed by locally determined heterogeneous preferences or policies. Examples include interdomain routing, peer-to-peer storage, and decentralised security systems. This dissertation introduces a notion called dispute — a cyclic structure that underlies the dependence and preferences of subsystems. Disputes may cause advers...

Many outsourcing contracts are expiring, and vendor transition is becoming an increasing concern in business. However, little research exists to help organizations manage vendor transition, a tripartite problem between the client, outgoing and incoming vendor. This paper applies balance of threat theory, a political science theory about interactions among nations, to explain and predict client ...

This paper investigates the effects of the formation of free trade agreements (FTAs) on trade disputes. We construct a unique and comprehensive dataset on inter-country trade disputes from 1995 to 2007. The dataset covers 110 countries and 1130 trade disputes. We find that the incidences of trade disputes between two countries are positively associated with economic size, economic growth, and t...

Modern approaches to political measurement have generally ignored the importance of out-of-sample predictive performance. This is problematic for two reasons: first, many of the abstractions scholars attempt to proxy for are themselves expectations; and second, the resulting measures are prone to overfitting. We advocate a data-driven approach to measurement based on the train-validate-test par...

Traditional leaders have a formal role in South Africa’s post-apartheid local government, and in some cities in the country, notably in KwaZulu-Natal, their presence has presented some important political challenges. This paper explores the relationship between longstanding institutional arrangements which support chiefdoms and traditional authority control over land and development, and the em...

BACKGROUND Settlements between doctors and patients provide a solution to complicated disputes. However, some disputes may be renewed as a result of negligence by both parties. The purpose of this study was to review the legal issues that may potentially arise during the preparation of settlement agreements and to propose a list of requirements for ensuring the effectiveness of these settlement...

The Voting Rights Act has radically altered the political status of minority voters and dramatically transformed the partisan structure of American politics. Given the political and racial salience of cases brought under the Act, it is surprising that the growing literature on the effects of a judge’s ideology and race on judicial decisionmaking has overlooked these cases. This Article provides...