Defining Agency and Its Scope (II)

Fiduciary law necessarily raises issues of delineation and demarcation, which this paper demonstrates through examples involving common-law agents. Serving as an agent, and thus as a fiduciary, does not necessarily mean that agency law prescribes all duties that the agent owes the principal. The agent may have rights external to the relationship that the agent may exercise, distinct from the duty of loyalty owed the principal. When an agent acts outside the bounds of an agency relationship, the principal’s consent is not requisite to conduct that would constitute disloyalty within the bounds of the agency relationship. The paper illustrates the significance of this point through a series of examples drawn from a range of contexts, including auctions of art objects. Prior scholarship neglects the implications of demarcations that define the scope of an agency relationship and of fiduciary relationships more generically. More generally or theoretically, the paper examines the qualities of fiduciary duty as a default rule, arguing that the relative “stickiness” of the default varies. Agency law contains two different kinds of altering rules—necessary and sufficient conditions to vary a default rule—consisting of agreements that define the scope of the agent’s representative role on behalf of the principal, and consent by the principal to actions by the agent within that scope that relieve the agent of liability for breach of fiduciary duty, which impose significantly different requisites. The basic distinction between agreement and consent has parallels elsewhere in agency law; for example, ratification, like consent, requires specificity because to be legally effective ratification requires that the principal know, as a matter of historical fact, what the agent has done. Agreement, on the other hand, requires less specificity, comparable to manifestations that confer actual authority on an agent which necessarily does not require that the principal foresee all actions that the agent may take that fall within the scope of the grant of authority. And ratification, like effective consent, is a matter of historical fact, not hypothesis. These implications follow because agency law, by positioning an agent as the principal’s representative for purposes of legally-salient interactions with third parties and facts about the world, frames the agent as an extension of the principal, not the principal’s substitute

Defining Agency and Its Scope (II)

Fiduciary law necessarily raises issues of delineation and demarcation, which this paper demonstrates through examples involving common-law agents. Serving as an agent, and thus as a fiduciary, does not necessarily mean that agency law prescribes all duties that the agent owes the principal. The agent may have rights external to the relationship that the agent may exercise, distinct from the duty of loyalty owed the principal. When an agent acts outside the bounds of an agency relationship, the principal’s consent is not requisite to conduct that would constitute disloyalty within the bounds of the agency relationship. The paper illustrates the significance of this point through a series of examples drawn from a range of contexts, including auctions of art objects. Prior scholarship neglects the implications of demarcations that define the scope of an agency relationship and of fiduciary relationships more generically. More generally or theoretically, the paper examines the qualities of fiduciary duty as a default rule, arguing that the relative “stickiness” of the default varies. Agency law contains two different kinds of altering rules—necessary and sufficient conditions to vary a default rule—consisting of agreements that define the scope of the agent’s representative role on behalf of the principal, and consent by the principal to actions by the agent within that scope that relieve the agent of liability for breach of fiduciary duty, which impose significantly different requisites. The basic distinction between agreement and consent has parallels elsewhere in agency law; for example, ratification, like consent, requires specificity because to be legally effective ratification requires that the principal know, as a matter of historical fact, what the agent has done. Agreement, on the other hand, requires less specificity, comparable to manifestations that confer actual authority on an agent which necessarily does not require that the principal foresee all actions that the agent may take that fall within the scope of the grant of authority. And ratification, like effective consent, is a matter of historical fact, not hypothesis. These implications follow because agency law, by positioning an agent as the principal’s representative for purposes of legally-salient interactions with third parties and facts about the world, frames the agent as an extension of the principal, not the principal’s substitute

Better duplicate detection for systematic reviewers: Evaluation of Systematic Review Assistant-Deduplication Module

BACKGROUND: A major problem arising from searching across bibliographic databases is the retrieval of duplicate citations. Removing such duplicates is an essential task to ensure systematic reviewers do not waste time screening the same citation multiple times. Although reference management software use algorithms to remove duplicate records, this is only partially successful and necessitates removing the remaining duplicates manually. This time-consuming task leads to wasted resources. We sought to evaluate the effectiveness of a newly developed deduplication program against EndNote. METHODS: A literature search of 1,988 citations was manually inspected and duplicate citations identified and coded to create a benchmark dataset. The Systematic Review Assistant-Deduplication Module (SRA-DM) was iteratively developed and tested using the benchmark dataset and compared with EndNote’s default one step auto-deduplication process matching on (‘author’, ‘year’, ‘title’). The accuracy of deduplication was reported by calculating the sensitivity and specificity. Further validation tests, with three additional benchmarked literature searches comprising a total of 4,563 citations were performed to determine the reliability of the SRA-DM algorithm. RESULTS: The sensitivity (84%) and specificity (100%) of the SRA-DM was superior to EndNote (sensitivity 51%, specificity 99.83%). Validation testing on three additional biomedical literature searches demonstrated that SRA-DM consistently achieved higher sensitivity than EndNote (90% vs 63%), (84% vs 73%) and (84% vs 64%). Furthermore, the specificity of SRA-DM was 100%, whereas the specificity of EndNote was imperfect (average 99.75%) with some unique records wrongly assigned as duplicates. Overall, there was a 42.86% increase in the number of duplicates records detected with SRA-DM compared with EndNote auto-deduplication. CONCLUSIONS: The Systematic Review Assistant-Deduplication Module offers users a reliable program to remove duplicate records with greater sensitivity and specificity than EndNote. This application will save researchers and information specialists time and avoid research waste. The deduplication program is freely available online

Default risk in asset pricing

This paper provides an analytical solution for the impact of default risk on the valuation of realistically intricate claims on time dependent uncertain income streams. Its modular structure allows us to adjust the set of assumptions concerning the event of default to the specificity of the environment which surrounds the asset. The importance of such a flexibility is illustrated in the context of corporate debt, examining the simplest case of finite lived coupon paying corporate bonds with principal repayment at maturity. The magnitude of risk premia, as well as the term structure of credit spreads, are not surprisingly largely determined by the assumed default scenario.asset pricing; default risk; bankruptcy

Default risk in asset pricing

This paper provides an analytical solution for the impact of default risk on the valuation of realistically intricate claims on time dependent uncertain income streams. Its modular structure allows us to adjust the set of assumptions concerning the event of default to the specificity of the environment which surrounds the asset. The importance of such a flexibility is illustrated in the context of corporate debt, examining the simplest case of finite lived coupon paying corporate bonds with principal repayment at maturity. The magnitude of risk premia, as well as the term structure of credit spreads, are not surprisingly largely determined by the assumed default scenario

When “He” can also be “She”: an ERP study of reflexive pronoun resolution in written mandarin Chinese

The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender information in text, but this is an issue that has seldom been addressed in psycholinguistics. In Chinese, the written forms of the reflexive pronouns are composed of a pronoun plus the reflexive "/self" (/himself and /herself). The present study focuses on how such gender specificity interacts with the gender type of an antecedent, whether definitional (proper name) or stereotypical (stereotypical role noun) during reflexive pronoun resolution. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, gender congruity between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent was studied by manipulating the gender type of antecedents and the gender specificity of reflexive pronouns (default: /himself vs. specific: /herself). Results included a P200 "attention related" congruity effect for /himself and a P600 "integration difficulty" congruity effect for /herself. Reflexive pronoun specificity independently affected the P200 and N400 components. These results highlight the role of /himself as a default applicable to both genders and indicate that only the processing of /herself supports a two-stage model for anaphor resolution. While both reflexive pronouns are evaluated at the bonding stage, the processing of the gender-specific reflexive pronoun is completed in the resolution stage

Dealing Automatically with Exceptions by Introducing Specificity in ASP

Answer Set Programming (ASP), via normal logic programs, is known as a suitable framework for default reasoning since it offers both a valid formal model and operational systems. However, in front of a real world knowledge representation problem, it is not easy to represent information in this framework. That is why the present article proposed to deal with this issue by generating in an automatic way the suitable normal logic program from a compact representation of the information. This is done by using a method, based on specificity, that has been developed for default logic and which is adapted here to ASP both in theoretical and practical points of view