Direct contact and authoritarianism as moderators between extended contact and reduced prejudice: Lower threat and greater trust as mediators

Using a representative sample of Dutch adults (N = 1238), we investigated the moderating influence of direct contact and authoritarianism on the potential of extended contact to reduce prejudice. As expected, direct contact and authoritarianism moderated the effect of extended contact on prejudice. Moreover, the third-order moderation effect was also significant, revealing that extended contact has the strongest effect among high authoritarians with low levels of direct contact. We identified trust and perceived threat as the mediating processes underlying these moderation effects. The present study thus attests to the theoretical and practical relevance of reducing prejudice via extended contact. The discussion focuses on the role of extended contact in relation to direct contact and authoritarianism as well as on the importance of trust in intergroup contexts

Understanding User Behavioral Intention to Adopt a Search Engine that Promotes Sustainable Water Management

An increase in users’ online searches, the social concern for an efficient management of resources such as water, and the appearance of more and more digital platforms for sustainable purposes to conduct online searches lead us to reflect more on the users’ behavioral intention with respect to search engines that support sustainable projects like water management projects. Another issue to consider is the factors that determine the adoption of such search engines. In the present study, we aim to identify the factors that determine the intention to adopt a search engine, such as Lilo, that favors sustainable water management. To this end, a model based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) is proposed. The methodology used is the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis with the Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS). The results demonstrate that individuals who intend to use a search engine are influenced by hedonic motivations, which drive their feeling of contentment with the search. Similarly, the success of search engines is found to be closely related to the ability a search engine grants to its users to generate a social or environmental impact, rather than users’ trust in what they do or in their results. However, according to our results, habit is also an important factor that has both a direct and an indirect impact on users’ behavioral intention to adopt different search engines

Expertise and the fragmentation of intellectual autonomy

In The Great Endarkenment, Elijah Millgram argues that the hyper-specialization of expert domains has led to an intellectual crisis. Each field of human knowledge has its own specialized jargon, knowledge, and form of reasoning, and each is mutually incomprehensible to the next. Furthermore, says Millgram, modern scientific practical arguments are draped across many fields. Thus, there is no person in a position to assess the success of such a practical argument for themselves. This arrangement virtually guarantees that mistakes will accrue whenever we engage in cross-field practical reasoning. Furthermore, Millgram argues, hyper-specialization makes intellectual autonomy extremely difficult. Our only hope is to provide better translations between the fields, in order to achieve intellectual transparency. I argue against Millgram’s pessimistic conclusion about intellectual autonomy, and against his suggested solution of translation. Instead, I take his analysis to reveal that there are actually several very distinct forms intellectual autonomy that are significantly in tension. One familiar kind is direct autonomy, where we seek to understand arguments and reasons for ourselves. Another kind is delegational autonomy, where we seek to find others to invest with our intellectual trust when we cannot understand. A third is management autonomy, where we seek to encapsulate fields, in order to manage their overall structure and connectivity. Intellectual transparency will help us achieve direct autonomy, but many intellectual circumstances require that we exercise delegational and management autonomy. However, these latter forms of autonomy require us to give up on transparency

The Evolution of Antitrust Doctrine After \u3ci\u3eOhio v. Amex\u3c/i\u3e and the \u3ci\u3eApple v. Pepper\u3c/i\u3e Decision That Should Have Been

If the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Apple Inc. v. Pepper (Apple) had hewed to the precedent established by Ohio v. American Express Co. (Amex), it would have begun its antitrust inquiry with the observation that the relevant market for the provision of app services is an integrated one, in which the overall effect of Apple’s conduct on both app users and app developers must be evaluated. A crucial implication of the Amex decision is that participants on both sides of a transactional platform are part of the same relevant market, and the terms of their relationship to the platform are inextricably intertwined. We believe the Amex Court was correct in deciding that effects falling on the “other” side of a tightly integrated, two-sided market from challenged conduct must be addressed by the plaintiff in making its prima facie case. But that outcome entails a market definition that places both sides of such a market in the same relevant market for antitrust analysis. As a result, the Amex Court’s holding should also have required a finding in Apple that an app user on one side of the platform who transacts with an app developer on the other side of the market, in a transaction made possible and directly intermediated by Apple’s App Store, is similarly deemed to be in the same market for standing purposes. Under the proper conception of the market, it is difficult to maintain that either side does not have standing to sue the platform for alleged anticompetitive conduct relating to the terms of its overall pricing structure, whether the specific terms at issue apply directly to that side or not. Both end users and app developers are “direct” purchasers from Apple—of superficially different products, but in a single, inextricably interrelated market. Both groups should have standing and should be able to establish antitrust injury—harm to competition—by showing harm to either group, as long as they can establish the requisite interrelatedness of the two sides of the market. As we discuss, such a result would have been consistent with the way antitrust doctrine has long evolved—in both its substantive and its procedural aspects—to reflect new economic knowledge, particularly with respect to such “nonstandard” business models. I. Introduction ... A. Ohio v. American Express Co. and Apple Inc. v. Pepper: A Failure of Antitrust Doctrinal Evolution II. The Nexus Between Procedure and Substance in Antitrust Law ... A. Quick Look and the Evolution of the Standards of Antitrust Review ... B. The Interplay of Procedure and Substance in the Doctrines of Antitrust Standing ... 1. Antitrust Injury and Antitrust Standing ... 2. The Indirect Purchaser Doctrine III. Nonstandard Contracts and Antitrust Doctrine: Accommodating the Economics of Two-Sided Markets in Antitrust Procedure ... A. The Basic Economics of Two-Sided Markets ... B. Amex, Market Definition, and Effects Analysis ... 1. Implications for the Consideration of “Out-of-Market” Effects ... C. The Relationship Between Market Definition and Standing IV. The Court’s Failure to Incorporate the Economics of Two-Sided Markets in Its Apple Inc. v. Pepper Decision ... A. Campos v. Ticketmaster and the Error of Doctrinal Formalism ... 1. The Consequences of the Formalistic Application of Illinois Brick to New Business Models V. What the Proper Procedural Analysis in Apple Inc. v. Pepper Would Have Looked Like ... A. Procedure Does Not Determine Substantive Outcomes VI. Conclusio

Image scoring in ad-hoc networks : an investigation on realistic settings

Encouraging cooperation in distributed Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) remains an open problem. Emergent application domains such as Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are characterised by constraints including sparse connectivity and a lack of direct interaction history. Image scoring, a simple model of reputation proposed by Nowak and Sigmund, exhibits low space and time complexity and promotes cooperation through indirect reciprocity, in which an agent can expect cooperation in the future without repeat interactions with the same partners. The low overheads of image scoring make it a promising technique for ad-hoc networking domains. However, the original investigation of Nowak and Sigmund is limited in that it (i) used a simple idealised setting, (ii) did not consider the effects of incomplete information on the mechanism’s efficacy, and (iii) did not consider the impact of the network topology connecting agents. We address these limitations by investigating more realistic values for the number of interactions agents engage in, and show that incomplete information can cause significant errors in decision making. As the proportion of incorrect decisions rises, the efficacy of image scoring falls and selfishness becomes more dominant. We evaluate image scoring on three different connection topologies: (i) completely connected, which closely approximates Nowak and Sigmund’s original setup, (ii) random, with each pair of nodes connected with a constant probability, and (iii) scale-free, which is known to model a number of real world environments including MANETs

A framework for security requirements engineering

This paper presents a framework for security requirements elicitation and analysis, based upon the construction of a context for the system and satisfaction arguments for the security of the system. One starts with enumeration of security goals based on assets in the system. These goals are used to derive security requirements in the form of constraints. The system context is described using a problem-centered notation, then this context is validated against the security requirements through construction of a satisfaction argument. The satisfaction argument is in two parts: a formal argument that the system can meet its security requirements, and a structured informal argument supporting the assumptions expressed in the formal argument. The construction of the satisfaction argument may fail, revealing either that the security requirement cannot be satisfied in the context, or that the context does not contain sufficient information to develop the argument. In this case, designers and architects are asked to provide additional design information to resolve the problems

The emergence of the concept of unjust enrichment in New Zealand, its relationship to the remedial constructive trust and the development of the status of joint ventures in equity

From the 1970s onward there have been numerous attempts to persuade the courts of New Zealand that unjust enrichment might be an acceptable basis for imposing equitable remedies. The foundation for this proposition rests upon the supposed existence of a broad principle that the imposition of a constructive trust is justified in any circumstances where it would be against equity or good conscience to allow the retention of property by one who has an ostensible legal title. So the unjust enrichment, once established, becomes the cause of action and the constructive trust follows as an equitable remedy of a proprietary nature which is available to prevent the unjust enrichment. This has important ramifications for the development of the law pertaining to restitution in this country. This paper will show that the acceptance of the remedial constructive trust is linked to the development of a law of restitution founded upon the principle of unjust enrichment. It will also be shown that, while the roots of the conceptual distinction between law and equity remain intact, in many courts the practical ramifications of that distinction are being eroded, particularly in commercial cases

SME application of LCA-based carbon footprints

Following a brief introduction about the need for businesses to respond to climate change, this paper considers the development of the phrase ‘carbon footprint’. Widely used definitions are considered before the authors offer their own interpretation of how the term should be used. The paper focuses on the contribution small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) make to the economy and their level of influence in stimulating change within organisations. The experience of an outreach team from the Engineering Department of a UK university is used which draws on the experience of delivering regional economic growth projects funded principally through the European Regional Development Fund. Case studies are used including the development of bespoke carbon footprints for SMEs from an initiative delivered by the outreach team. Limitations of current carbon footprints are identified based on this higher education-industry knowledge exchange mechanism around three main themes of scope, the assessment method and conversion factors. Evidence and discussions are presented that conclude with the presentation of some solutions based on the work undertaken with SMEs and a discussion on the merits of the two principally used methodologies: life-cycle analysis and economic input–output assessment

Entrepreneurial Networking in China and Russia: Comparative Analysis and Implications for Western Executives

In this article, I compare personal networks of Chinese and Russian entrepreneurs in terms of network structure, relationships and resources accessed in networks. The Chinese data is composed of longitudinal phone interviews with 94 Internet entrepreneurs in Beijing, and the Russian data is comprised of longitudinal face-to-face interviews with 75 entrepreneurs in Moscow, Ekaterinburg and Petrozavodsk. Implications for Western executives are discussed.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39905/3/wp520.pd