Property rights provide incentives to create information but they also provide incentives to hoard it prior to the award of protection. All-or-nothing rights, in particular, limit prior sharing. An unintended consequence is to slow, not hasten, forward progress when innovation hinges on combining disparately owned private ideas. In response, we propose a solution based on a reward definition of...

Interactive software, systems and devices are typically designed for a specific (set of) purpose(s) and the design process used ensures that they will perform satisfactorily when used as specified. In many cases users will use these systems in unintended and unexpected ways where it seems appropriate, which can lead to problems as the differing usage situations have unintended effects on use. W...

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States has sought to encourage institutional developments in Iraq that would contribute to national reconciliation and mitigate sectarian and insurgent violence. In these reform efforts, including recent “benchmarks,” the Bush administration has drawn on power-sharing and federalist models. The purpose of these efforts is to overcome the political ...

DU R I N G T H E B E G I N N I N G years of the Houston Annenberg Challenge, constructive partnerships (Schön & McDonald 1998) helped tremendously in the design and refinement of this reform initiative for public schools. Schools teamed up with evaluators in innovative ways to reflect on their reforms and improve their effectiveness. This chapter describes the context of the reform; the philoso...

In today’s globally-leveled playing field, forces such as consumer activism, demographic change and technological evolution are forcing industry leaders to continuously evaluate their strategies to achieve or retain competitive advantage. These forces are even stronger in the manufacturing industry, and they are exacerbated by the unintended consequences of accelerating globalization. For insta...

Theoretical and empirical aspects of policy failures due to subsidies are discussed in the context of international trade. A general classification of subsidies that cause environmental externalities is presented. The economic and environmental impacts of producer subsidies on international trade are examined with partial equilibrium analysis. The magnitude and economic and environmental releva...

An unintended consequence of specialization in science is poor communication across specialties. Information developed in one area of research may be of value in another without anyone becoming aware of the fact. We describe and evaluate interactive software and database search strategies that facilitate the discovery of previously unknown cross specialty information of scientific interest. The...

Vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of words built from only a handful of phonemes, so that inevitably longer words tend to contain shorter ones. In many languages (but not all) such embedded words occur more often word-initially than word-finally, and this asymmetry, if present, has farreaching consequences for spoken-word recognition. Prior research had ascribed the asymmetry to suffix...

This paper analyzes the United States Medicare hospice reimbursement policy. The existing policy consists of a daily payment for each patient under care with a global cap of revenues accrued during the Medicare year, which increases for each newly admitted patient. We investigate the hospice’s expected profit and provide reasons for a spate of recent provider bankruptcies related to the reimbur...

rizona’s controversial immigration law is emblematic of a new period in American immigration history that features a rampedup commitment to reduce illegal immigration and to establish a new “illegal class” of those who have already entered the United States. The debate about changes to immigration law is often framed as a moral, ethical, or legal issue, but the facts behind this debate are not ...