The economics of interchange fees and their regulation : an overview

Debit cards ; Credit cards

When Environment Matters: Inter-Organizational Effects on Sociomaterial Imbrications and Change

Previous research on sociomateriality, a recently developed perspective arguing that social and material aspects acquire their properties in the process of their mutual imbrications, has mainly focused on an intra-organizational level of analysis. In this paper we investigate how the inter-organizational relations influence within-organizational processes of sociomaterial imbrications. We conducted case-study of communities of social computing developing their routines and technologies over a 16-year period in the market of Internet access providers. Our findings indicate that inter-organizational influence is an important factor shaping the processes of change in organizational routines and technologies and only partly supports the recent findings of Paul Leonardi about the perception-based nature of these changes as we evidence that this is not applicable in certain types of environments. Based on our findings we develop a process model of inter-organizational influence on sociomaterial imbrications and change and discuss its implications for theory and practice

Beyond foraging: behavioral science and the future of institutional economics

Institutions affect economic outcomes, but variation in them cannot be directly linked to environmental factors such as geography, climate, or technological availabilities. Game theoretic approaches, based as they typically are on foraging only assumptions, do not provide an adequate foundation for understanding the intervening role of politics and ideology; nor does the view that culture and institutions are entirely socially constructed. Understanding what institutions are and how they influence behavior requires an approach that is in part biological, focusing on cognitive and behavioral adaptations for social interaction favored in the past by group selection. These adaptations, along with their effects on canalizing social learning, help to explain uniformities in political and social order, and are the bedrock upon which we build cultural and institutional variability

Rational Multiparty Computation

The field of rational cryptography considers the design of cryptographic protocols in the presence of rational agents seeking to maximize local utility functions. This departs from the standard secure multiparty computation setting, where players are assumed to be either honest or malicious. ^ We detail the construction of both a two-party and a multiparty game theoretic framework for constructing rational cryptographic protocols. Our framework specifies the utility function assumptions necessary to realize the privacy, correctness, and fairness guarantees for protocols. We demonstrate that our framework correctly models cryptographic protocols, such as rational secret sharing, where existing work considers equilibrium concepts that yield unreasonable equilibria. Similarly, we demonstrate that cryptography may be applied to the game theoretic domain, constructing an auction market not realizable in the original formulation. Additionally, we demonstrate that modeling players as rational agents allows us to design a protocol that destabilizes coalitions. Thus, we establish a mutual benefit from combining the two fields, while demonstrating the applicability of our framework to real-world market environments.^ We also give an application of game theory to adversarial interactions where cryptography is not necessary. Specifically, we consider adversarial machine learning, where the adversary is rational and reacts to the presence of a data miner. We give a general extension to classification algorithms that returns greater expected utility for the data miner than existing classification methods

The Five-Tool Mediator: Game Theory, Baseball Practices, and Southpaw Scouting

This essay borrows heavily from the fields of game theory, baseball business strategy and neuropsychology. Knitting these together, the author advocates that mediators become inciters and advocates for an outcome that solves problems, irrespective of the amount in controversy and the initial gap between offer and counter-offers of settlement. This is not an essay on how to do facilitator’s tasks in settlement negotiations; instead, the reader should consider how to think about the mediator’s role in the process, advancing the value proposition in negotiations. This essay does not propose that mediators become group therapists but instead urges them to relentlessly expose (1) the essence of each party’s intentions and purpose within the controversy, and (2) a range of satisfactory outcomes from the perspective of each party. Once that is accomplished, the second, incitement, phase may commence. In that phase, three transitions must occur. First, the concept of wounding must fade into the background while the concept of amelioration – the path of most proximate to making each party whole – assumes the foreground. In that initial transition, the warriors – those for whom the encounter’s savagery matters equally with the outcome – must be disarmed and converted into fellow seekers of imaginative solutions to the joint problems to be resolved. This requires foremost that the mediators alter the mind-set of the adversaries from the binary thinking realm. The second transition converts each party’s belief that a win is the ultimate goal to understanding that there is a problem to be solved at the lowest possible cost to him in the most expeditious manner feasible – and that such an outcome is as close to victory as he may be realizable. This transition requires moving from pragmatic to imaginative thinking about a controversy’s resolution. A realistic perspective in a controversy, while helpful, is not all-sufficient to achieving a resolution in many cases unless a third-party adjudicator intervenes and directs the dispute’s outcome. The pragmatist’s perspective, that the dispute is a transaction whose terms have been written down but not agreed to, yet, will not guide the parties down the path to resolution. The appropriate perspective sees the dispute environment as writ on a white board, the problem set forth at its top margin and the resolution schematic remaining to be written. Here, every possible solution is available for capture, evaluation and incorporation into an overall solution. The third transition relates to trust: Learning to accept evidence of trust extended by the other disputant and to extend indications of trust without expectation of reciprocity from the adversary. Adopting these attitudes will set the facilitator on the path to becoming a five-tool mediator. For the person not engaged in the business of facilitation, this essay offers a lens through which to evaluate the talent of a prospective facilitator or to gauge a current facilitator’s ongoing performance

Herders in the budgetary commons : the fiscal policy consequences of multiparty government in the European Union

In contemporary political economy, it is often argued that multiparty government contributes to sustainability problems in the public economy. This is because parties have incentives to offer targeted policies to narrow-based voter groups while neglecting a large share of the costs associated with such policies. The structure of the situation is arguably similar to overconsumption and under-saving problems often encountered in the management of natural resources, which has given rise to the notion of the budgetary or fiscal common-pool problem. In this view, multiparty government is associated with increases in public spending, taxes and debt as well as persistent budget deficits; such phenomena becoming clearer as the number of parties in government grows. This work challenges the view by arguing that such problems are not inherent features of multiparty politics, but rather follow from the combination of multiparty decision making and the breakdown of programmatic linkages between voters and political parties. In particular, when corruption and other forms of favouritism and partiality are prevalent in the public sector, the credibility of programmatic goals and statements that parties make decreases. This creates room for non-programmatic, distributive objectives and hence encourages the exploitation of the tax base, which becomes visible in empirical associations between the number of government parties and fiscal policy aggregates. In contrast, impartial and efficient state institutions make it possible to present and implement programmes with far-reaching and universalistic implications, whereby the programmatic stances rather than the number of government parties explain policy outcomes. This makes it possible to manage the ‘budgetary commons’ in a sustainable way. These arguments are tested on data that covers the current 28 member states (as of 2017) of the European Union from the early 1970s or mid-1990s to 2012. The results are largely in line with the expectations, although the effects of political variables differ somewhat between the post-communist member states and the rest. The number of parties in government explains fiscal policy outcomes mainly in those post-communist countries where favouritism and partiality in the use of state authority are most prevalent. However, in the post-communist area these effects disappear when state institutions are more impartial, whereby the effects of variables capturing programmatic aspects of politics have explanatory power. Outside the post-communist area, political variables generally have little effect on fiscal policy aggregates, especially since the early 1990s. However, in that group of countries, those countries with most impartial state institutions have been most likely to adopt stringent and encompassing fiscal rules.  Nykyisessä poliittisen talouden tutkimuksessa on tavallista väittää, että monipuoluehallinto on omiaan johtamaan julkistalouden kestävyysongelmiin. Tämä johtuu siitä, että puolueilla on kannustimia tarjota kohdennettuja etuja kapeapohjaisille äänestäjäryhmille ja jättää suuri osa toimenpiteiden kustannuksista huomiotta. Rakenteeltaan tilanteen väitetään usein muistuttavan luonnonvarojen hallinnassa usein ilmeneviä ylikulutus- ja alisäästämisongelmia. Siksi budjettiyhteisvaranto-ongelman käsite on tullut suosituksi. Tämän näkemyksen mukaan monipuoluehallinto on yhteydessä julkisten menojen, verotuksen ja velan kasvuun sekä sitkeisiin alijäämiin siten, että nämä ilmiöt käyvät sitä voimakkaammiksi, mitä suurempi määrä puolueita on jakamassa hallitusvaltaa. Tämän tutkimuksen mukaan edellä mainitut ilmiöt eivät ole monipuoluehallinnon välttämättömiä seurauksia. Pikemminkin ne seuraavat siitä, että monipuoluepolitiikkaa tehdään äänestäjien ja puolueiden välisten ohjelmallisten yhteyksien ollessa heikkoja tai puuttuessa kokonaan. Erityisesti korruption ja muiden puolueellisuuden muotojen ollessa julkisella sektorilla yleisiä puolueiden esittämien ohjelmallisten tavoitteiden ja väittämien uskottavuus heikkenee. Tämä luo tilaa ei-ohjelmallisille jakopoliittisille motiiveille ja kannustaa käyttämään veropohjaa jakopoliittisten resurssien lähteenä, mikä ilmenee hallituspuolueiden lukumäärän ja julkistaloudellisten muuttujien välisinä empiirisinä yhteyksinä. Puolueettomat ja tehokkaat valtioinstituutiot sen sijaan mahdollistavat laajojen ja pitkävaikutteisten ohjelmien esittämisen ja toimeenpanemisen, jolloin puolueiden esittämät ohjelmalliset linjat, hallituspuolueiden lukumäärän sijaan, selittävät politiikan lopputuloksia. Näitä väittämiä testataan aineistolla, joka kattaa Euroopan unionin nykyiset 28 jäsenmaata (vuoden 2017 tilanteen mukaan) 1970-luvun alusta tai 1990-luvun puolivälistä vuoteen 2012. Tulokset ovat pitkälti odotusten mukaisia, joskin poliittisten muuttujien vaikutukset poikkeavat toisistaan jälkikommunistisissa ja muissa jäsenmaissa. Hallituspuolueiden lukumäärä selittää julkistaloudellisia lopputuloksia lähinnä niissä jälkikommunistisissa maissa, joissa puolueellisuus julkisen vallan käytössä on kaikkein yleisintä. Jälkikommunistisella alueella nämä ilmiöt kuitenkin häviävät valtioinstituutioiden käydessä puolueettomammiksi, jolloin politiikan ohjelmallisia puolia kuvaavat muuttujat saavat selitysvoimaa. Jälkikommunistisen alueen ulkopuolella poliittisilla muuttujilla on vain vähän vaikutusta julkistaloudellisiin mittareihin erityisesti tarkasteltaessa 1990-luvun alun jälkeistä ajanjaksoa. Kuitenkin jälkikommunistisen alueen ulkopuolisista maista ne, joiden valtioinstituutiot ovat kaikkein puolueettomimmat, ovat todennäköisimmin ottaneet käyttöön vahvoja ja kattavia budjetointisääntöjä