Basel II: A Contracting Perspective

Financial safety nets are incomplete social contracts that assign responsibility to various economic sectors for preventing, detecting, and paying for potentially crippling losses at financial institutions. This paper uses the theories of incomplete contracts and sequential bargaining to interpret the Basel Accords as a framework for endlessly renegotiating minimal duties and standards of safety-net management across the community of nations. Modelling the stakes and stakeholders represented by different regulators helps us to understand that inconsistencies exist in prior understandings about the range of sectoral effects that the 2004 Basel II agreement might produce. The analysis seeks to explain why, in the U.S., attempting to resolve these inconsistencies has spawned an embarrassingly fractious debate and repeatedly pushed back Basel II's scheduled implementation.

Social Welfare

"Social Welfare" offers, for the first time, a wide-ranging, internationally-focused selection of cutting-edge work from leading academics. Its interdisciplinary approach and comparative perspective promote examination of the most pressing social welfare issues of the day. The book aims to clarify some of the ambiguity around the term, discuss the pros and cons of privatization, present a range of social welfare paradoxes and innovations, and establish a clear set of economic frameworks with which to understand the conditions under which the change in social welfare can be obtained

The Middle East Quartet of Mediators: Understanding Multiparty Mediation in the Middle East Peace Process

This dissertation seeks to answer the question: Under what conditions does multiparty mediation fail to move conflicting parties toward a comprehensive peace agreement? The object of study is the Middle East Quartet of Mediators from its formation in 2002 to the Annapolis Conference in November, 2007. Although some progress was made during this period, no formal peace agreement was reached and therefore, the ultimate objective of the Quartet was not attained. The study seeks both to deepen our theoretical understanding of multiparty mediation as well as identify specific leverage points that could lead toward resolution of the conflict in Palestine and Israel. The methodology employed is a qualitative investigation of the multiparty mediation efforts of the Quartet. It is based on an investigation of Quartet statements as well as a series of interviews of key Quartet participants and academic experts on the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The ultimate aim is to make future mediation efforts more successful

Addressing stability issues in mediated complex contract negotiations for constraint-based, non-monotonic utility spaces

Negotiating contracts with multiple interdependent issues may yield non- monotonic, highly uncorrelated preference spaces for the participating agents. These scenarios are specially challenging because the complexity of the agents’ utility functions makes traditional negotiation mechanisms not applicable. There is a number of recent research lines addressing complex negotiations in uncorrelated utility spaces. However, most of them focus on overcoming the problems imposed by the complexity of the scenario, without analyzing the potential consequences of the strategic behavior of the negotiating agents in the models they propose. Analyzing the dynamics of the negotiation process when agents with different strategies interact is necessary to apply these models to real, competitive environments. Specially problematic are high price of anarchy situations, which imply that individual rationality drives the agents towards strategies which yield low individual and social welfares. In scenarios involving highly uncorrelated utility spaces, “low social welfare” usually means that the negotiations fail, and therefore high price of anarchy situations should be avoided in the negotiation mechanisms. In our previous work, we proposed an auction-based negotiation model designed for negotiations about complex contracts when highly uncorrelated, constraint-based utility spaces are involved. This paper performs a strategy analysis of this model, revealing that the approach raises stability concerns, leading to situations with a high (or even infinite) price of anarchy. In addition, a set of techniques to solve this problem are proposed, and an experimental evaluation is performed to validate the adequacy of the proposed approaches to improve the strategic stability of the negotiation process. Finally, incentive-compatibility of the model is studied.Spain. Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (grant TIN2008-06739-C04-04

Flexibility Provisions in Multilateral Environmental Treaties

In international politics, intergovernmental treaties provide the rules of the game. Similar to private law, treaty designers face a trade-off between flexibility to adjust to unforeseen contingencies and the danger that the binding nature of the treaty and hence, the level of commitment by treaty members, is being undermined if the treaty can be amended too easily. In this paper, we address this problem in the analytical framework of institutional economics, drawing in particular on the incomplete contracts literature. Furthermore, we derive preliminary hypotheses and operational concepts for the measurement of flexibility in international treaties. Based on 400 treaties and supplementary agreements from the field of international environmental law, we provide new insights into the combined application of rules for adoption and entry into force of amendments, as well as provisions for conflict resolution and interpretative development. Using correspondence analysis, we show that treaty provisions can be represented in a two-dimensional property space, where treaties can be arrayed according to the degree of institutionalisation as well as along a flexibility dimension. --

PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING: NONCOMBATANT MOBILIZATION FOR PEACE IN AFRICA

During the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of domestic social actors mobilized for peace in several African countries. They did so under unfavorable political conditions. Some of them went further and pursued their objective for peace at the level of formal negotiations. This particularizing inquiry sought to understand the process leading to their engagement with formal negotiations. To achieve this, inquiry focused on two questions: what about the conditions and contexts prevailing in the 1990s to early 2000s accounted for social actor\u27s engagement with formal negotiation processes and how civic groups went about doing so. The main argument was that certain opportunities within the unfavorable political conditions and social actors\u27 understanding of war accounted for the pursuit of peace objectives at the level of formal negotiations. A combination of specific and configurational history strategies were employed to reconstruct the process of engagement and the conditions under which it unfolded. This reconstruction relied on intrinsic and extrinsic analyses of ten peace campaigns led by religious leaders and women organizations that occurred between 1990 and 2005 in Angola, Burundi, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Somalia. Data on these campaigns was collected through archival research and face to face interviews. The resulting account suggests that the failure of social actor\u27s humanitarian activities to mitigate the social and economic suffering caused by the war and the failure of formal negotiations to secure a lasting peace led to social actors\u27 pursuit for an end to war. However, to engage with political actors with political, military and economic leverage, social actors had to deploy their social resources creatively to pursue their demands for peace

Correspondences and Contradictions in International and Domestic Conflict Resolution: Lessons From General Theory and Varied Contexts

Does the field of conflict resolution have any broadly applicable theories that work across the different domains of international and domestic conflict? Or, are contexts, participants, and resources so domain specific and variable that only thick descriptions of particular contexts will do? These are important questions which have been plaguing me in this depressing time for conflict resolution professionals, from September 11,2001 (9/11), to the war against Iraq. Have we learned anything about conflict resolution that really does improve our ability to describe, predict, and act to reduce unnecessary and harmful conflict? These are the questions I want to explore in this essay, all the while knowing that I will ask more questions than I have answers to. My hope is to spark more rigorous attention to the possibility of comparative dispute resolution study and practice, using key concepts, theories, empirical studies, practical wisdom, and experiential insights to spark and encourage more multi-level and multi-unit analysis of some of our shared propositions

Beyond Dyads: Decision support for online multiparty negotiation, coalition formation and negotiation outcomes

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH