The Value of Knowing Your Enemy

Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or impossible to enforce. We study so-called {\em anonymous} auctions to understand the revenue tradeoffs and to develop simple anonymous auctions that are approximately optimal. We consider digital goods settings and show that the optimal anonymous, dominant strategy incentive compatible auction has an intuitive structure --- imagine that bidders are randomly permuted before the auction, then infer a posterior belief about bidder i's valuation from the values of other bidders and set a posted price that maximizes revenue given this posterior. We prove that no anonymous mechanism can guarantee an approximation better than O(n) to the optimal revenue in the worst case (or O(log n) for regular distributions) and that even posted price mechanisms match those guarantees. Understanding that the real power of anonymous mechanisms comes when the auctioneer can infer the bidder identities accurately, we show a tight O(k) approximation guarantee when each bidder can be confused with at most k "higher types". Moreover, we introduce a simple mechanism based on n target prices that is asymptotically optimal and build on this mechanism to extend our results to m-unit auctions and sponsored search

Risk Taking and Force Protection

This paper addresses two questions about the morality of warfare: (1) how much risk must soldiers take to minimize unintended civilian casualties caused by their own actions (“collateral damage”), and (2) whether it is the same for the enemy\u27s civilians as for one\u27s own.The questions take on special importance in warfare where one side is able to attack the other side from a safe distance, but at the cost of civilian lives, while safeguarding civilians may require soldiers to take precautions that expose them to greater risk. In a well-known article, Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin argue that while soldiers must rank the protection of their own civilians above their own protection, they must rank their own protection above that of enemy civilians. Avishai Margalit and Michael Walzer responded that the only morally relevant distinction is between combatants and non-combatants, not the identity of the non-combatants. The present paper concludes that Margalit and Walzer are correct. Although soldiers may take extra risks on behalf of their own civilians, the minimally acceptable risk for enemy civilians is the same as the minimally acceptable risk for their own.In response to the first question, the paper emphasizes two chief points. First is the equal worth of military and civilian lives, which implies a weak form of “risk egalitarianism”: even if morality often permits people to transfer risk from themselves to others, transferring large risks to others in order to spare oneself from smaller risks is morally wrong, because indirectly it treats oneself as more valuable than the other. Second, I explore the possibility that soldiers belong to a profession in which honor may require them to take risks for civilians. This is particularly true when the risks to civilians come from the soldiers’ own violence. The second question is whether soldiers’ special obligation to protect their own people (not other people) creates a higher minimum standard of care for their own people (and not other people). I answer no, because the special obligation is to protect their people from enemy violence, while the dilemma is whether to protect civilians from the soldiers’ own violence. The responsibility to protect the innocent from violence of one’s own making is a universal, not a special, obligation. Thus, in both questions 1 and 2, the fact that soldiers themselves create the violence that endangers civilians plays a crucial role in the answers.The concluding sections address two crucial loose ends. First is the question of whether soldiers might in fact be more valuable than civilians (including their own civilians) because they are not only human beings, but also “military assets.” The paper answers no, because this way of thinking involves illegitimate double counting of the soldier’s value, coupled with a refusal to double count the value of anyone else. Second is the related question of whether minimizing military casualties might turn out to be a military necessity because the civilian population is deeply casualty-averse, and the war effort requires their political support. Again the answer is no: otherwise, the less will to fight a country has, the less moral and legal obligation it has to fight well

Knowing differently in systemic intervention

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper makes the case for extended ways of knowing in systemic intervention. It argues that the deployment of formal (even reflective) thinking and dialogue methods are inadequate, on their own, to the critical tasks of comprehending larger wholes and appreciating others' viewpoints. Theory and techniques need to go further and access other forms of knowing, held in experiential, practical or symbolic ways. This could offer a better basis to incorporate marginalized people and other phenomena that are affected by interventions but do not have a voice, such as ecosystems and future generations

The Other Side of the Hill: Combat Intelligence in the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918

For some, a discussion on military intelligence and the First World War is the ultimate oxymoron. They might ask: when and where did generals display any use of intelligence? That the Battle of the Somme continued beyond the first day, they might argue, demonstrates a complete lack of military intelligence, or any other type of intelligence for that matter. If there ever was a war, they might add, where donkeylike officers led lion-like soldiers to slaughter against barbed wire, machine guns, and trenches, then the Great War was it. The oft told story of how Sir Launcelot Kiggell, Sir Douglas Haig’s chief of staff, upon seeing the Passchendaele battlefield and its sea of mud and carnage, reportedly wept, “My God! Did we send men to fight in that?” only to be answered by an aid: “It’s worse further up,” has lent credence to the position that the British high command was, indeed, incompetent. The myth that British generals were donkeys is an old one, and not likely to disappear completely anytime soon—at least in popular imagination. However, a study of combat intelligence should help to dispel this myth, for when intelligence was used wisely—as it usually was in the Canadian Corps—it increased the likelihood of success in the field. It did this by dispersing some of the fog of war and the resulting battlefield confusion. Good intelligence gave planners the details necessary for preparing the incredibly complex set-piece battles that were the hallmark of First World War combat. Such meticulous care and precision preparation ensured that there were fewer surprises on Zero Day, the day of attack, then otherwise would have been the case. By cutting through the fog of war, intelligence reduced the assaulting troops’ dependence on circumstance and luck, while restoring to commanders some degree of control over events in what was an otherwise highly chaotic environment. This was no small matter, especially on battlefields where communications were painfully slow, erratic and unreliable. Officers and men of the Great War faced conditions and technological advances that had completely altered warfare from what they had expected and trained for. To compensate, the Canadians, and others, used combat intelligence to help overcome such obstacles as poor communications, heavy machine-gun and artillery fire, entrenchments and barbed wire, and came to see it as a crucial element in waging successful trench warfare

Embracing Failure

{Excerpt} Infinite complexity, endless possibilities, and resulting constant change characterize the 21st century. More intimately and faster than ever before, the realms of environment, economy, society, polity, and technology coevolve in adaptive systems. The times demand the ability to take risks, embrace failure, and move on. Developing a culture of intelligent experimentation and failure analysis is no longer an option. Individuals, groups, and organizations must create, innovate, and reflect to generate the radical solutions they need to tackle challenges in markets, industries, organizations, geographies, intellectual disciplines, and generations. To accomplish this, they must learn to learn and learn to unlearn before, during, and after