Reputation in multi agent systems and the incentives to provide feedback

The emergence of the Internet leads to a vast increase in the number of interactions between parties that are completely alien to each other. In general, such transactions are likely to be subject to fraud and cheating. If such systems use computerized rational agents to negotiate and execute transactions, mechanisms that lead to favorable outcomes for all parties instead of giving rise to defective behavior are necessary to make the system work: trust and reputation mechanisms. This paper examines different incentive mechanisms helping these trust and reputation mechanisms in eliciting users to report own experiences honestly. --Trust,Reputation

Optimal Accomplice-Witnesses Regulation under Asymmetric Information

We study the problem of a Legislator designing immunity for privately informed cooperating accomplices. Our objective is to highlight the positive (vertical) externality between expected returns from crime and the information rent that must be granted by the Legislator to whistleblowers in order to break their code of silence (omertà) and elicit truthful information revelation. We identify the accomplices' incentives to release distorted information and characterize the second-best policy limiting this behavior. The central finding is that this externality leads to a second-best policy that purposefully allows whistleblowers not to disclose part of their private information. We also show that accomplices must fulfill minimal information requirements to be admitted into the program (rationing), that a bonus must be awarded to accomplices providing more reliable information and that, under some conditions, rewarding a self-reporting `boss' can increase efficiency. These results are consistent with a number of widespread legislative provisions.Accomplice-witnesses, Adverse Selection, Leniency, Organized Crime

Punishment and penal activity : the expansion of legal fines and fees in Texas from 1985 to 2015

Across the United States, legal fines and fees generate millions of dollars per year in revenue despite widening the net of criminalization and increasing penal severity for poorer individuals. Unlike in other penal policy domains, legal fines and fees represent an ambiguously defined form of punishment that has received bipartisan support. Understudied is how legal fines and fees have become an increasingly preferred policy choice among state-level political actors. In this study, I use archival data on legal statutes and legislative sessions in Texas – home to one of the largest prison and jail system in the U.S. – to investigate the development of legal fines and fees across a 30-year period. I use insights from socio-political and legal theories to offer a comprehensive analysis of the structure of legislative policy networks and the development of legal fines and fees legislation. I demonstrate that both liberal and conservative political actors facilitated the passage of legal debt legislation. Furthermore, I consider the role of legislative testimony to show the association between testimony and the rate of legislation on legal fines and fees. I discuss the implications of my findings for understanding how policy networks and legislative activity are related to criminal justice outcomes and are influenced by a variety of social actors. My study contributes to theoretical explanations on the roles of state actors in developing policies that become increasingly implicated in social inequalities.Sociolog

Contract enforcement and institutions among the Maghribi Traders: Refuting Edwards and Ogilvie

Edwards and Ogilvie (2008) dispute the empirical basis for the view (Greif, e.g., 1989, 1994,2006) that multilateral reputation mechanism mitigated agency problems among the eleventh-century Maghribi traders. They assert that the relations among merchants and agents were law-based. This paper refutes this assertion using quantitative and documentary evidence thereby vindicating the position that the legal system had a marginal role in mitigating agency problems in long-distance trade in this historical era. Edwards and Ogilvie constantly present legal actions in non-trade related legal cases as evidence for a reliance on the legal system for matters pertaining to long-distance trade. Their criticism of Greif’s documentary analysis also fails scrutiny. The claim that merchants' relations with their overseas agents were law-based is wrong. This paper is based on quantitative analyses of the corpuses containing the hundreds of documents on which the literature relies and a careful review of the documents and the literature Edwards and Ogilvie cite. Their assertion is shown to be based on unrepresentative and irrelevant examples, an inaccurate description of the literature, and a consistent misreading of the few sources they consulted. In particular, their examples for the use of the court are mainly taken from mandatory legal procedures associated with sorting out the assets and liabilities of deceased traders’ estates. Such examples do not support the claim that agency relations were law-based. The quantitative analysis reveals that empirical basis for the multilateral reputation view is stronger than originally perceived. This paper also sheds light on the roles of the legal system and reputation mechanism during this period.institutions; contract-enforcement; reputation; Maghribi traders; agency relations

Contract Enforcement and Institutions among the Maghribi Traders: Refuting Edwards and Ogilvie

Edwards and Ogilvie dispute the empirical basis of the view that a multilateral reputation mechanism mitigated agency problems among the eleventh-century Maghribi traders. They allege that the relations among merchants and agents were founded in law. This paper refutes this assertion using comprehensive quantitative analyses of all available primary sources and a careful review of the documents and the literature Edwards and Ogilvie cite. Among recent new quantitative findings reported: (1) less than one percent of the documents’ content is devoted to legal activity on any matter. (2) The legal system was mainly used for mandatory, non-trade related matters. (3) The documents reflect thousands of agency relations but there are less than six court documents possibly reflecting its use in agency disputes. (4) A ten percent random sample of all the documents finds no trade-related legal actions among Maghribis beyond those in the court documents. (5) About 75 percent of agency relations were not based on a legal contract. The paper also reaffirms the accuracy of Greif’s documentary examples and sheds light on the roles of the legal system and reputation mechanism during this period.multilateral reputation mechanism, Maghribi traders, Edwards and Ogilvie

Contract Enforcement and Institutions among the Maghribi Traders: Refuting Edwards and Ogilvie

Edwards and Ogilvie (2008) dispute the empirical basis for the view (Greif, e.g., 1989, 1994, 2006) that multilateral reputation mechanism mitigated agency problems among the eleventh-century Maghribi traders. They assert that the relations among merchants and agents were law-based. This paper refutes this assertion using quantitative and documentary evidence thereby vindicating the position that the legal system had a marginal role in mitigating agency problems in long-distance trade in this historical era.** Edwards and Ogilvie constantly present legal actions in non-trade related legal cases as evidence for a reliance on the legal system for matters pertaining to long-distance trade. Their criticism of Greif’s documentary analysis also fails scrutiny. The claim that merchants' relations with their overseas agents were law-based is wrong. This paper is based on quantitative analyses of the corpuses containing the hundreds of documents on which the literature relies and a careful review of the documents and the literature Edwards and Ogilvie cite. Their assertion is shown to be based on unrepresentative and irrelevant examples, an inaccurate description of the literature, and a consistent misreading of the few sources they consulted. In particular, their examples for the use of the court are mainly taken from mandatory legal procedures associated with sorting out the assets and liabilities of deceased traders’ estates. Such examples do not support the claim that agency relations were law-based. The quantitative analysis reveals that empirical basis for the multilateral reputation view is stronger than originally perceived. This paper also sheds light on the roles of the legal system and reputation mechanism during this period.

State-Sponsored Injustice: The Case of Eugenic Sterilization

In analytic political philosophy, it is common to view state-sponsored injustice as the work of a corporate agent. But as I argue, structural injustice theory provides grounds for reassessing the agential approach, producing new insights into state-sponsored injustice. Using the case of eugenic sterilization in the United States, this article proposes a structurally-sensitive conception of state-sponsored injustice with six components: authorization, protection, systemization, execution, enablement, and norm- and belief-influence. Iris Marion Young’s models of responsibility for agential and structural injustice, and the place of state-sponsored injustice with respect to these models, are also discussed

Managerial Work in a Practice-Embodying Institution - The role of calling, the virtue of constancy

What can be learned from a small scale study of managerial work in a highly marginal and under-researched working community? This paper uses the ‘goods-virtues-practices-institutions’ framework to examine the managerial work of owner-directors of traditional circuses. Inspired by MacIntyre’s arguments for the necessity of a narrative understanding of the virtues, interviews explored how British and Irish circus directors accounted for their working lives. A purposive sample was used to select subjects who had owned and managed traditional touring circuses for at least 15 years, a period in which the economic and reputational fortunes of traditional circuses have suffered badly. This sample enabled the research to examine the self-understanding of people who had, at least on the face of it, exhibited the virtue of constancy. The research contributes to our understanding of the role of the virtues in organizations by presenting evidence of an intimate relationship between the virtue of constancy and a ‘calling’ work orientation. This enhances our understanding of the virtues that are required if management is exercised as a domain-related practice

Corrupt Nonmarket Strategies Megaprojects: The Case of a Corrupt Cartel of Construction Companies in the Oil and Gas Sector

In this paper I analyze a corrupt cartel of Brazilian construction companies that supplied services to Petrobras, while it invested billions of dollars in megaprojects in Brazil. I use non-traditional data drawn from publicly available and verifiable court investigation data and plea agreement from the public prosecution Brazil and in the USA. I find that the cartel created a set of rules, and enacted their nonmarket strategies across 12 years and that the stability of the group was also mediated by “institutional anchors of trust”. These anchors were peripheral actors such as money launderers and lobbyist that were not part of the firms’ organizational structures. I extend the strategy literature by explaining how corrupt cartels adopt a portfolio of nonmarket strategies that are essential for their maintenance and collaboration of longterm deviant practice