Name-passing calculi and crypto-primitives: A survey

The paper surveys the literature on high-level name-passing process calculi, and their extensions with cryptographic primitives. The survey is by no means exhaustive, for essentially two reasons. First, in trying to provide a coherent presentation of different ideas and techniques, one inevitably ends up leaving out the approaches that do not fit the intended roadmap. Secondly, the literature on the subject has been growing at very high rate over the years. As a consequence, we decided to concentrate on few papers that introduce the main ideas, in the hope that discussing them in some detail will provide sufficient insight for further reading

Accounting for secrets

The Soviet dictatorship used secrecy to shield its processes from external scrutiny. A system of accounting for classified documentation assured the protection of secrets. The associated procedures resemble a turnover tax applied to government transactions. There is evidence of both compliance and evasion. The burden of secrecy was multiplied because the system was also secret and so had to account for itself. Unique documentation of a small regional bureaucracy, the Lithuania KGB, is exploited to yield an estimate of the burden. Measured against available benchmarks, the burden looks surprisingly heavy

In Search of Workers' Real Effort Reciprocity - A Field and a Laboratory Experiment

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory experiments that show a clear own wage sensitivity on effort. In an additional real-effort laboratory experiment we show that explicit cost and surplus information that enables to exactly calculate employer’s surplus from the work contract is a crucial pre-requisite for a positive wage-effort relation. This demonstrates that employee’s reciprocity requires a clear assessment of the surplus at stake

Accounting for Secrets

The Soviet state counted people, resources – and secret papers. The need to account for secrets was a transaction cost of autocratic government. This paper finds archival evidence of significant costs, multiplied by secrecy’s recursive aspect: the system of accounting for secrets was also secret and so had to account for itself. The evidence suggests that most Soviet officials complied most of the time. Numerous instances also imply that careless handling could take root and spread locally until higher authorities intervened. The paper uses the case of a small regional bureaucracy, the Lithuania KGB, to estimate the aggregate costs of handling secret paperwork. Over the period from 1954 to 1982, accounting for secrets makes up around one third of this organization’s archived records. This figure is surprisingly large, and is the main new fact contributed by the paper. There is much time variation, some of it not easily explained.Accounting; Dictatorship; Norms; Secrecy; Soviet Union; Transaction Costs

Maryland v. King: The Fourth Amendment Spirals Down the Double Helix

This commentary previews an upcoming Supreme Court case, Maryland v. King, in which the Court may decide whether requiring an arrestee to submit to a buccal swab for identification purposes violates the arrestee\u27s privacy interests under the Fourth Amendment