Coordination, focal points and voting in strategic situations : a natural experiment

This paper studies coordination in a multi-stage elimination tournament with large monetary incentives and a diversified subject pool drawn from the adult British population. In the tournament, members of an ad hoc team earn money by answering general knowledge questions and then eliminate one contestant by plurality voting without prior communication. We find that in the early rounds of the tournament, contestants use a focal principle and coordinate on one of the multiple Nash equilibria in pure strategies by eliminating the weakest member of the team. However, in the later rounds, contestants switch to playing a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium

The Weakest Link - A Field Experiment in Rational Decision Making

We analyze the BBC TV game show "The Weakest Link", using data from 77 episodes, covering 13,380 questions. We focus on the banking decision, where a contestant chooses to secure an amount of money for the eventual winner, or to risk it on a general knowledge question. In the latter case, should he answer correctly, the amount at stake increases exponentially. We show that banking decisions are not rational: a crude rule of thumb performs substantially better than the contestants’ strategies. Yet, at least to some extent, contestants do take into account their own ability and the fact that questions are progressively more difficult.Experimental Economics, TV Game Shows, Bounded Rationality

Case Study On Social Engineering Techniques for Persuasion

There are plenty of security software in market; each claiming the best, still we daily face problem of viruses and other malicious activities. If we know the basic working principal of such malware then we can very easily prevent most of them even without security software. Hackers and crackers are experts in psychology to manipulate people into giving them access or the information necessary to get access. This paper discusses the inner working of such attacks. Case study of Spyware is provided. In this case study, we got 100% success using social engineering techniques for deception on Linux operating system, which is considered as the most secure operating system. Few basic principal of defend, for the individual as well as for the organization, are discussed here, which will prevent most of such attack if followed.Comment: 7 Page

Conflicts with Multiple Battlefields

This paper examines conflicts in which performance is measured by the players' success or failure in multiple component conflicts, commonly termed “battlefields”. In multi-battlefield conflicts, behavioral linkages across battlefields depend both on the technologies of conflict within each battlefield and the nature of economies or diseconomies in how battlefield out-comes and costs aggregate in determining payoffs in the overall conflict.conflict, contest, battlefield, Colonel Blotto Game, auction, lottery

Commercial critical systems and critical infrastructure protection : a future research agenda

Secure management of Australia&rsquo;s commercial critical infrastructure presents ongoing challenges to owners and the government. Although it is currently managed through high-level information sharing via collaboration, but does this suit the commercial sector. One of the issues facing Australia is that the majority of critical infrastructure resides under the control of the business sector and certain aspects such of the critical infrastructure such as Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems are distributed entities and not a single entity. The paper focuses upon the security issues associated with SCM systems and critical infrastructure protection.<br /

Finnish Monetary and Foreign Exchange Policy on the Way towards the Euro

This paper presents the salient aspects of Finland?s monetary and exchange rate policies during the run-up to monetary union in the 1990s. In the course of slightly more than a decade, Finland?s monetary and exchange rate policies were thoroughly revamped. There were serious problems associated with the liberalisation process in the early part of the decade, the most noteworthy being an economic and banking crisis. Finland?s financial system nonetheless developed rapidly. As regards exchange rate policy, almost all varieties of exchange rate regime were tried. A fixed rate regime based on a currency index fell apart in the early part of the decade and was replaced by a floating rate system. Later, in 1993, this was combined with an inflation-targeting monetary policy strategy. At the start of 1995 Finland joined the European Union, and in October 1996 the markka was joined to the EU?s Exchange Rate Mechanism. The improvement in financial and price stability that followed the economic crisis facilitated the adjustment to the euro area?s single currency and single monetary policy at the start of 1999, which was accomplished without serious problems.monetary policy; foreign exchange policy; EMU; euro; monetary policy arrangements

The power politics of international tax cooperation : why Luxembourg and Austria accepted automatic exchange of information on foreign account holders' interest income

Theories of tax competition predict that small countries competing with large countries benefit, as they find it relatively easy to substitute revenue lost in a tax cut with revenue gained from incoming foreign tax base. If small countries can only lose from tax co-operation, why are Luxembourg and Austria bound to agree to a revised EU Savings Tax Directive that will oblige them to automatically provide information on foreign account holders’ interest income to residence countries? Putting emphasis on the neglected issue of power, I show that Luxembourg and Austria were first coerced into bilateral agreements on automatic exchange of information by the United States, which then activated a most-favored nation clause contained in the EU Directive on Administrative Co-operation in Tax Matters. As a result, the two countries were under a legal obligation to also extend greater co-operation to EU partners