The Internal Organization of the Cooperative Firm: An Extension of a New Institutional Digest

Agribusiness,

Bulgaria and Romania’s Accession to the EU: Postponement, Safeguards and the Rule of Law. CEPS Policy Briefs No. 102, 15 May 2006

The accession stories of Bulgaria and Romania are an excellent illustration of the EU being caught unawares when making important (legal and political) commitments to two future members while taking in good faith the commitments pledged by the same members-to-be

More than a passive interest

Abstract The defeat of the Dyer anti-lynching bill in 1922 was a turning point in relations between black Americans and the Republican Party. Little is understood, however, about the role played in the debates by President Warren Harding. This article contends that Harding's conflicted approach to presidential leadership caused him to mishandle the bill. The President's inability to choose between restrained 'whig' leadership and a more active 'stewardship' role resulted in an unstable executive style. The Dyer bill's failure was affected by this dilemma as black hopes were alternately raised and dashed by Harding's indecision. The bitterness of the bill's ultimate defeat was thus heightened, with severe consequences for the Republican party's long term electoral relationship with black voters

An open reproducible framework for the study of the iterated prisoner's dilemma

The Axelrod library is an open source Python package that allows for reproducible game theoretic research into the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. This area of research began in the 1980s but suffers from a lack of documentation and test code. The goal of the library is to provide such a resource, with facilities for the design of new strategies and interactions between them, as well as conducting tournaments and ecological simulations for populations of strategies. With a growing collection of 139 strategies, the library is a also a platform for an original tournament that, in itself, is of interest to the game theoretic community. This paper describes the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, the Axelrod library and its development, and insights gained from some novel research.Comment: 11 pages, Journal of Open Research Software 4.1 (2016

Monitoring in educational development projects : the development of a monitoring system

Monitoring in education is usually focused on the monitoring of educational systems at different levels. Monitoring of educational projects receives only recently explicit attention. The paper discusses first the concepts of educational monitoring and evaluation. After that, the experience with developing a monitoring system in an educational development project is described as a case. These experiences, in combination with literature on project monitoring in other contexts, provide a rich source of ideas, lessons learned, and problems to avoid in designing project monitoring

Towards a European Area of Higher Education: Change and Convergence in European Higher Education

history; Europeanization

Contending with Putin's Russia

As President Barack Obama enters his second term, relations with Russia present him with a set of thorny problems. The first-term "reset," a fresh American posture toward the Kremlin that was designed to build productive relations by offering compromises on a range of political and geostrategic issues, has clearly run its course. The Obama administration had partly based its hope for improved ties on the ability of Dmitry Medvedev, who served as Russia's president from 2008 to 2012, to achieve liberal reforms, especially on freedom of expression, the rule of law, and the ability of civil society to function without state intrusion. However, substantive reforms never materialized, former president and then prime minister Vladimir Putin remained the dominant force in government, and Russia moved abruptly in a more repressive direction following his return to the presidency in May 2012. Step by step, Putin has pushed through measures to deter public demonstrations, smear and limit funding for nongovernmental organizations, and place restrictions on the internet. He has also made anti-Americanism a central part of his political message. He has accused the United States of fomenting demonstrations against election fraud, shut down all U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs in Russia, withdrawn from a series of cooperative agreements with the United States, and signed a vindictive law that prohibits the adoption of Russian children by citizens of the United States.There can be little doubt that a new American policy toward the Kremlin is needed. To help inform the discussion on a new approach, Freedom House is publishing this package of materials on the state of human rights and democracy in Russia since Putin took power in 2000. In the centerpiece essay, Freedom House president David J. Kramer and Eurasia program director Susan Corke assess the nature of the Putin regime and advance a series of proposals for American policy in the coming period. Katherin Machalek, the research analyst for Freedom House's "Nations in Transit" publication, is the author of a companion piece that lays out the progressive legal restrictions on civil society organizations during the Putin era. The package also includes a chronology of selected developments in Russia from 2000 through 2012 , with a focus on the suppression of the political opposition, independent media, and civil society. The chronology, prepared by Freedom House researcher Marissa Miller, serves as a reminder that the repressive measures enacted over the past eight months do not amount to a new direction for Russia, but rather a continuation, in severe form, of trends that have dominated Russian politics throughout the Putin era. Finally, a series of graphical representations prepared by senior research assistant Bret Nelson illustrate the decline of political rights and civil liberties in Russia as measured by Freedom House's annual reports

The Ultimatum Game Revisited

The starting point of this article is the result of one ultimatum game experiment - one of many showing a huge deviation from the predictions of micro theory. However, further analysis gives an explanation of subject behavior that deserves to be seen as rational, if assumptions, such as a total secrecy resulting in no effects on reputation, are questioned. Responders' actual behavior can be understood as adjusted to generally realistic reputation effects, and the choices of the Proposers are surprisingly attuned to actual Responder demands. If seen in this light, the subjects seem to understand the situation and behave accordingly.Ultimatum; buffer; reputation; spite; altruism

11. Looking Back

From Alumni Views, Robert H. Bluestein (’67), “ILR addressed the social and economic issues of the times and sought to provide students with the tools to find solutions to many of the problems confronting society in the mid-to late-sixties. This was a period easily described as volatile, evolutionary, and sometimes revolutionary. As would have been the case at any vibrant institution, the curriculum and the students at ILR reflected those times.” Includes: Alumni Views of ILR; The Creation of the Alpern Scholarship and Prize; and A Professor’s Perspective