Enforcing Environmental Regulation: Implications of Remote Sensing Technology

We review economic models of environmental protection and regulatory enforcement to highlight several attributes that are particularly likely to benefit from new enforcement technologies such as remote sensing using satellites in space. These attributes include the quantity and quality of information supplied by the new technologies; the accessibility of the information to regulators, regulatees, and third parties; the cost of the information; and whether the process of information collection can be concealed from the observer. Satellite remote sensing is likely to influence all of these attributes and in general, improve the efficacy of enforcement.

Does the selection task detect cheater detection?

This is a thorough discussion of the use by Cosmides and her collaborators of the selection task in order to test the hypothesis that there exist an evolved “social contract algorithm and an extension, with further experimental data, of Sperber & Girotto's “Use or misuse of the selection task” (Cognition, in press)

Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Organizational Incentives to Care About the Law

DeMott discusses the fit between agency doctrine and the ability of organizations to obey or disregard the law. The opinion in In re Caremark International Inc. Derivative Litigation is central to DeMott\u27s analysis

To Say the Greatest Matters in the Simplest Way : A First Economic Injury Rule as a Restatement of Directness Standing Requirements in Federal Antitrust Law

In addition to traditional constitutional standing analysis, federal antitrust law examines a potential plaintiff\u27s claims under a series of specialized standing requirements. One of these requirements is that the plaintiff\u27s injury be a direct result of the antitrust violator\u27s misconduct. This requirement has been prominent in recent tobacco litigation where union health care trust funds sued the major tobacco companies in antitrust to recover the costs of treating nicotine-addicted beneficiaries. Federal courts generally denied standing to the trust funds for several reasons, one of which was the trust funds\u27 failure to satisfy the directness requirements. This Comment analyzes the tests that the U.S. Supreme Court has used to determine whether a plaintiff\u27s injuries are sufficiently direct to grant antitrust standing. It argues that these tests-the direct purchaser rule, the cost-plus contract exception, and the direct injury requirement-should be consolidated and restated as a first economic injury rule, under which standing is awarded, assuming other standing requirements are met, to the party that suffers the first economic impacts of the antitrust violation. This Comment concludes that although the courts may have properly denied standing to the trust funds for other reasons, the courts erred in declaring that the trust funds failed to satisfy any directness requiremen