A Targeted Existence

Over the summer, I visited a friend from Gettysburg who was having a party. The party was fun for the first half, and I was having a good time, so I decided to stay the night instead of walk in the dark to the bus. This is what parents and educators and older sisters and women everywhere had taught me: stay with people you know; clutch your keys in your hand; don’t walk alone. I was staying with my friend from school; I was safe. [excerpt

Is ChatGPT a Good Multi-Party Conversation Solver?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as influential instruments within the realm of natural language processing; nevertheless, their capacity to handle multi-party conversations (MPCs) -- a scenario marked by the presence of multiple interlocutors involved in intricate information exchanges -- remains uncharted. In this paper, we delve into the potential of generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 within the context of MPCs. An empirical analysis is conducted to assess the zero-shot learning capabilities of ChatGPT and GPT-4 by subjecting them to evaluation across three MPC datasets that encompass five representative tasks. The findings reveal that ChatGPT's performance on a number of evaluated MPC tasks leaves much to be desired, whilst GPT-4's results portend a promising future. Additionally, we endeavor to bolster performance through the incorporation of MPC structures, encompassing both speaker and addressee architecture. This study provides an exhaustive evaluation and analysis of applying generative LLMs to MPCs, casting a light upon the conception and creation of increasingly effective and robust MPC agents. Concurrently, this work underscores the challenges implicit in the utilization of LLMs for MPCs, such as deciphering graphical information flows and generating stylistically consistent responses.Comment: Accepted by Findings of EMNLP 202

Inequality and Political Clientelism: Evidence from South India

Political parties can be vehicles for economic and social development in poor countries. They can also serve as rent seeking instruments. Uncovering how parties function is therefore key to establishing the preconditions for good governance. The paper discusses when and why clientelism on the basis of party affiliation may arise. Operationally, party-based clientelism is defined as a bias of public policy in favour of members of the governing political party. In a sample of local governments in India, party-based clientelism is shown to exist in two out of four states and to be strongly affected by economic inequality.decentralization; patronage; clientelism; inequality; poverty; India

After conflict - placing the Sinn Féin party in a comparative politics context

Sinn Féin, the party most associated with the in public discourse with the term ‘republican’ in Ireland, is a party undergoing a process of development. It has been suggested that its recent electoral success would result in Sinn Féin moving to the centre and abandoning the civic republican focus on equality, political participation/activism and a national political project with a strong internationalist context – with which it has identified. However while aspects of Sinn Féin policy remain fluid and can lack clarity the evidence surveyed for this paper suggests that the party is not moving to the political centre on issues of social and economic equality, but is retaining a strong leftist, pro-equality agenda. Post Good Friday Agreement Sinn Féin is in its rhetoric keeping the issue of Irish unity strongly to the fore, in its manifestos both North and South. In an era of globalisation it has placed itself with the anti-corporate globalisation groupings and against right-wing nationalist parties with an anti-immigration platform. Finally, in an era of media-politics it is retaining its traditional focus on high levels of activism and participation among party members

Efficient collusion in optimal auctions

We study collusion in an IPV auction with binary type spaces. Collusion is organized by a third-party than can manipulate participation decisions. We characterize the optimal response of the seller to different threats of collusion among the bidders. We show that, contrary to the prevailing view that assymmetric information imposes transaction costs in side-contracting, collusion in the optimal auction is efficient when the third-party can implement monetary transfers as well as when it can implement monetary transfers and reallocations of the good. The threat of non-participation in the auction by a subset of bidders is crucial in constraining the seller's profit.COLLUSION; THIRD PARTY; OPTIMAL AUCTION

Pulling the Strings: Party Group Coordinators in the European Parliament

Since its post-Lisbon increase in (legislative and non-legislative) powers, the European Parliament (EP) is more relevant than ever in the geographically diversified multilevel system of the EU. Party group coordinators occupy a crucial position in collective decision-making within the EP. However, knowledge about these pivotal actors is absent. This raises the question as to who these party group coordinators are, what they do, and what indeed makes a good coordinator. A new data set shows that in 2012, more than one-fifth of coordinators of the three largest and most influential groups are German, with British and Spanish coordinators ranking a distant second before Romanians. Among coordinators from NMS, only one-eighth were newcomers

Problem-Solving Negotiation: Northern Ireland\u27s Experience with the Women\u27s Coalition Symposium

This paper is part of a Symposium that considered the relevance of domestic conflict resolution theories in broader cultural contexts. The Northern Ireland Women\u27s Coalition (Women\u27s Coalition) participated in the negotiations leading up to the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. Members of the Woman\u27s Coalition responded to thirty years of sectarian violence with a negotiation process based on accommodation, inclusion, and relationship building, concepts that resonate with American-style problem-solving negotiation. Using the Women\u27s Coalition as a case study, this Article suggests that there are procedural aspects of problem-solving negotiation theory that may work across domains, specifically in multi-party, intractable conflict situations, where not all players share the same end game. Topics discussed include: (i) background of the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Troubles , (ii) problem-solving negotiation theory, (iii) strategic approaches of the Women\u27s Coalition during the multi-party negotiations leading to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, (iv) perspectives on comparative dispute resolution, and (v) relevance of inclusion, trust and relationship building