94,509 research outputs found
Sharing the Burden of Collective Security in the European Union. Research Note
This article compares European Union (EU) burden-sharing in security governance distinguishing between assurance, prevention, protection, and compellence policies. We employ joint-product models and examine the variation in the level of publicness, the asymmetry of the distribution of costs and benefits, and aggregation technologies in each policy domain. Joint-product models predict equal burden sharing for protection and assurance because of their respective weakest-link and summation aggregation technologies with symmetric costs. Prevention is also characterized by the technology of summation, but asymmetry of costs implies uneven burden-sharing. Uneven burden-sharing is predicted for compellence because it has the largest asymmetry of costs and a best-shot aggregation technology. Evaluating burden-sharing relative to a country?s ability to contribute, Kendall tau-tests examine the rank-correlation between security burden and the capacity of EU member states. These tests show that the smaller EU members disproportionately shoulder the costs of assurance and protection; wealthier EU members carry a somewhat disproportionate burden in the provision of prevention, and larger EU members in the provision of compellence. When analyzing contributions relative to expected benefits, asymmetric marginal costs can largely explain uneven burden-sharing. The main conclusion is that the aggregated burden of collective security governance in the EU is shared quite evenly
Preservation of Semantic Properties during the Aggregation of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks
An abstract argumentation framework can be used to model the argumentative
stance of an agent at a high level of abstraction, by indicating for every pair
of arguments that is being considered in a debate whether the first attacks the
second. When modelling a group of agents engaged in a debate, we may wish to
aggregate their individual argumentation frameworks to obtain a single such
framework that reflects the consensus of the group. Even when agents disagree
on many details, there may well be high-level agreement on important semantic
properties, such as the acceptability of a given argument. Using techniques
from social choice theory, we analyse under what circumstances such semantic
properties agreed upon by the individual agents can be preserved under
aggregation.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2017, arXiv:1707.0825
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