Secure Grouping Protocol Using a Deck of Cards

We consider a problem, which we call secure grouping, of dividing a number of parties into some subsets (groups) in the following manner: Each party has to know the other members of his/her group, while he/she may not know anything about how the remaining parties are divided (except for certain public predetermined constraints, such as the number of parties in each group). In this paper, we construct an information-theoretically secure protocol using a deck of physical cards to solve the problem, which is jointly executable by the parties themselves without a trusted third party. Despite the non-triviality and the potential usefulness of the secure grouping, our proposed protocol is fairly simple to describe and execute. Our protocol is based on algebraic properties of conjugate permutations. A key ingredient of our protocol is our new techniques to apply multiplication and inverse operations to hidden permutations (i.e., those encoded by using face-down cards), which would be of independent interest and would have various potential applications

Between order and disorder: a 'weak law' on recent electoral behavior among urban voters?

A new viewpoint on electoral involvement is proposed from the study of the statistics of the proportions of abstentionists, blank and null, and votes according to list of choices, in a large number of national elections in different countries. Considering 11 countries without compulsory voting (Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Spain and Switzerland), a stylized fact emerges for the most populated cities when one computes the entropy associated to the three ratios, which we call the entropy of civic involvement of the electorate. The distribution of this entropy (over all elections and countries) appears to be sharply peaked near a common value. This almost common value is typically shared since the 1970's by electorates of the most populated municipalities, and this despite the wide disparities between voting systems and types of elections. Performing different statistical analyses, we notably show that this stylized fact reveals particular correlations between the blank/null votes and abstentionists ratios. We suggest that the existence of this hidden regularity, which we propose to coin as a `weak law on recent electoral behavior among urban voters', reveals an emerging collective behavioral norm characteristic of urban citizen voting behavior in modern democracies. Analyzing exceptions to the rule provide insights into the conditions under which this normative behavior can be expected to occur.Comment: Version 1: main text 19 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables; Supporting Information: 19 pages. Version 2: minor correction

Analysis of the 2004 Venezuela Referendum: The Official Results Versus the Petition Signatures

On August 15th, 2004, Venezuelans had the opportunity to vote in a Presidential Recall Referendum to decide whether or not President Hugo Ch\'{a}vez should be removed from office. The process was largely computerized using a touch-screen system. In general the ballots were not manually counted. The significance of the high linear correlation (0.99) between the number of requesting signatures for the recall petition and the number of opposition votes in computerized centers is analyzed. The same-day audit was found to be not only ineffective but a source of suspicion. Official results were compared with the 1998 presidential election and other electoral events and distortions were found.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS263 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Demand for Lottery Products: A Cross-Country Analysis

Varieties of lottery games are played regularly in more than half of the world’s countries. When considering the probability of winning a lottery jackpot, we have a sense of the illogicality in buying a lottery ticket. This begs the question, why do people buy lottery products? This paper investigates the socio-economic and demographic features that help to explain the behavioural trend of lottery product purchasing throughout the world. With a multivariate linear regression analysis, this study uses macroeconomic data and qualitative variables to explain the variation of a country’s per-capita lottery sales. Some very interesting results were obtained. For example, the higher a country’s level of education, percentage of males and Christians, the higher are the lottery sales. The relationship between lottery sales and per-capita GDP is an inverted U: lottery sales increase simultaneously with increases in per-capita GDP up to a point and then start to decrease. These results are of interest because they suggest a link between certain socio-economic and demographic characteristics and consumer behaviour and may give a boost to the use of these characteristics in consumer research.Gambling; Lotteries; Education; Religiosity; Culture; Cross-country.

The Spatial Variation of Voting Behaviour in Canada in 1963

Previous studies in different countries have unfolded consequential relationships between a number of socio-economic factors and voting behavior. Ethnicity, religion, trade or profession were among the most useful voter characteristics in explaining party preference. While hypotheses of voting behavior for Canada are also prolific, most of them were based upon local studies. The present study of 53 selected incorporated cities in 1963 general election attempts to test such hypotheses at the national level. The majority of the proposed independent variables were derived from the previous case studies. The hypotheses were tested by means of a computerized multiple regression analysis. The maps of percentage of total votes cast for the Liberal, the Progressive Conservative and the New Democratic Parties, revealed a regional rather than a national pattern of voting preference. Mixed patterns existed in the province of Ontario while the province of Quebec and the West were mainly dominated by the Liberal and the Progressive Conservative Party respectively. The strength of the New Democratic Party was scattered in the West and Ontario only. Despite the adoption of a large number of variables only a few of them were useful in explaining the national patterns. The statistical results confirmed that ethnic and religious variables rather than socio-economic ones best indicated national political party support. Further study of the regional patterns based on the stratified sampling method is recommended

It is Hobbes, not Rousseau : an experiment on social insurance

We perform an experiment on social insurance to provide a laboratory replica of some important features of the welfare state. In the experiment, all individuals in a group decide whether to make a costly effort, which produces a random (independent) outcome for each one of them. The group members then vote on whether to redistribute the resulting and commonly known total sum of earnings equally amongst themselves. This game has two equilibria, if played once. In one of them, all players make effort and there is little redistribution. In the other one, there is no effort and nothing to redistribute. A solution to the repeated game allows for redistribution and high effort, by the threat to revert to the worst of these equilibria. Our results show that redistribution with high effort is not sustainable. The main reason for the absence of redistribution is that rich agents do not act differently depending on whether the poor have worked hard or not. There is no social contract by which redistribution may be sustained by the threat of punishing the poor if they do not exert effort. Thus, the explanation of the behavior of the subjects lies in Hobbes, not in Rousseau

It is Hobbes, not Rousseau:an experiment on voting and redistribution

We perform an experiment which provides a laboratory replica of some important features of the welfare state. In the experiment, all individuals in a group decide whether to make a costly effort, which produces a random (independent) outcome for each one of them. The group members then vote on whether to redistribute the resulting and commonly known total sum of earnings equally amongst themselves. This game has two equilibria, if played once. In one of them, all players make effort and there is little redistribution. In the other one, there is no effort and nothingWe thank Iris Bohnet, Tim Cason, David Cooper, John Duffy, Maia Guell, John Van Huyck and Robin Mason for helpful conversations and encouragement. The comments of the Editor and two referees helped improve the paper. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation under grants CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2006-0016 (all authors), ECO2009-10531 (Cabrales), ECO2008-01768 (Nagel) and the Comunidad de Madrid under grant Excelecon (Cabrales), the Generalitat de Catalunya and the CREA program (Nagel), and project SEJ2007-64340 of Spain’s Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Rodríguez Mora).Publicad