108,574 research outputs found
Did the ancient Celts practice human sacrifice?
This dissertation sets out to examine the generally accepted claim that one of the
features of ancient Celtic society was the practice of human sacrifice, and to find out
whether the available written and archaeological evidence supports this claim. It
was decided to limit the period under review to the six hundred years from c. 500 BC
to AD 100. After reviewing the literature on the subject, a number of texts from
ancient Greek and Roman writers were examined to ascertain what was said. A
number of these writers referred to the ancient Celts practising human sacrifice. Next
the results from a variety of archaeological investigations was looked at to see if
there were any material remains which would support these references in the
classical writings. It was discovered that there is little material evidence to support
the allegations of human sacrifice among the ancient Celts, that those finds which
have been used to verify these assertions have more than one interpretation, and that
the vast majority of serious writers on the subject maintain that there is almost no
evidence to back up the equally widely held assumption that such practice must have
existed. The conclusion of this study is that there is no reliable evidence for the
practice of human sacrifice among the ancient Celts. It is recommended that further
research might be carried out into a) the relationship between bodies and artefacts
found in water, b) alternative explanations for how ‘bog bodies’ might have died, and
c) why scholars believe human sacrificed was practised by the ancient Celts
Public Choice and the Economic Analysis of Anarchy: A Survey
Public choice economists began studying the economics of anarchy in the 1970s. Since then, the amount of research on anarchy has burgeoned. This article surveys the important public choice contributions to the economics of anarchy. Following the lead of the early public choice economists, many current economists are researching and analyzing how individuals interact without government. From their non-public-interested explanations of the creation of government law enforcement to their historical studies of attempts to internalize externalities under anarchy, public choice scholars are arriving at a more realistic perspective on government and how people interact when government law enforcement is lacking. Although the economics of politics often receives more attention, the economics of anarchy is an important area of research in public choice.Anarchism; Lawlessness; Order; Internalization of Externalities; Self-Governance
Price of Anarchy in Bernoulli Congestion Games with Affine Costs
We consider an atomic congestion game in which each player participates in
the game with an exogenous and known probability , independently
of everybody else, or stays out and incurs no cost. We first prove that the
resulting game is potential. Then, we compute the parameterized price of
anarchy to characterize the impact of demand uncertainty on the efficiency of
selfish behavior. It turns out that the price of anarchy as a function of the
maximum participation probability is a nondecreasing
function. The worst case is attained when players have the same participation
probabilities . For the case of affine costs, we provide an
analytic expression for the parameterized price of anarchy as a function of
. This function is continuous on , is equal to for , and increases towards when . Our work can be interpreted as
providing a continuous transition between the price of anarchy of nonatomic and
atomic games, which are the extremes of the price of anarchy function we
characterize. We show that these bounds are tight and are attained on routing
games -- as opposed to general congestion games -- with purely linear costs
(i.e., with no constant terms).Comment: 29 pages, 6 figure
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