Carceri e Stranieri.

The issue of foreign national prisoners needs to be considered in a national and supranational perspective because of its importance, related to different topics connected to the respect of the rights of the foreign inmate. Among these, we have to keep in special consideration the exposure to discrimination, the lack of access to justice (due inter alia to the language barrier), the relational isolation, the difficult reintegration and the impact of the status of illegal immigrant. Facing such a view, it’s easy to understand the central importance of all the international instruments for the protection of foreign prisoners, especially of the European framework decisions, unfortunately non totally applied in each Member State. Their particular importance is due to the fact that, if correctly implemented, they can have a strong impact on different phenomena, such as the diminution of the foreign prisoners and their effective reintegration, thanks to the mutual recognition to criminal decision and the possibility to transfer persons deprived of liberty. However, different kind of reasons may hinder the fully application of these framework decisions. So, from one hand, their implementation needs efforts from each Member State, from the other one, the national governments should consider the possibility to identify privileged interlocutors for the approval of convention that can allow the transfer of stakeholders.La tematica dei detenuti stranieri, connotata da una speciale rilevanza sia se considerata a livello nazionale sia a livello sovranazionale, solleva tutta una serie di questioni connesse al rispetto dei diritti delle persone che si trovano a scontare una pena in un Paese diverso da quello di origine. Tra queste, spiccano quella dell’esposizione alla discriminazione, delle difficoltà di accesso alla giustizia (dovuto fra l’altro alle barriere linguistiche), dell’isolamento relazionale, del reinserimento e dell’impatto dello status di clandestino. Dinanzi a siffatto panorama, assumono importanza centrale gli strumenti internazionali a tutela dei detenuti stranieri: particolare riguardo verrà riservato alle decisioni-quadro europee, strumenti dall’alto potenziale, ma non ancora compiutamente applicati in tutti gli Stati Membri. Tra i fenomeni su cui potrebbero impattare figurano, da un lato, quello del mutuo riconoscimento delle sentenze penali e, dall’altro, quello del trasferimento dei detenuti, delle persone in misura alternativa e dei reclusi in forza di un provvedimento cautelare: la loro corretta applicazione permetterebbe dunque un decremento degli stranieri reclusi e al contempo la possibilità di un loro reinserimento nel contesto di appartenenza. Tuttavia, ragioni ideologiche, teoriche e legislative, possono ostacolare l’applicazione delle decisioni-quadro, così che, se da un lato si rende necessario il loro recepimento all’interno dei singoli ordinamenti degli Stati Membri, dall’altro si ritiene di fondamentale importanza l’individuazione, da parte delle realtà nazionali, di quei Paesi che potrebbero rappresentare gli interlocutori privilegiati di percorsi di trasferimento che possano essere intrapresi dai soggetti interessati

Introduction and notations

I

Does increasing public trust in the EU's institutions undermine support for national institutions?

Several studies have identified a link between the public’s trust in national institutions and their trust in the EU’s institutions. Yet the effect of this link is unclear, with some studies finding that an increase in trust in national institutions boosts trust in the EU’s institutions, and other studies identifying the opposite relationship. Drawing on a new study, Goran Dominioni, Alberto Quintavalla, and Alessandro Romano explain that the relationship between trust in national and EU institutions is bilateral, almost always asymmetric, and that spillover effects change over time

Signaling in Posted Price Auctions

We study single-item single-unit Bayesian posted price auctions, where buyers arrive sequentially and their valuations for the item being sold depend on a random, unknown state of nature. The seller has complete knowledge of the actual state and can send signals to the buyers so as to disclose information about it. For instance, the state of nature may reflect the condition and/or some particular features of the item, which are known to the seller only. The problem faced by the seller is about how to partially disclose information about the state so as to maximize revenue. Unlike classical signaling problems, in this setting, the seller must also correlate the signals being sent to the buyers with some price proposals for them. This introduces additional challenges compared to standard settings. We consider two cases: the one where the seller can only send signals publicly visible to all buyers, and the case in which the seller can privately send a different signal to each buyer. As a first step, we prove that, in both settings, the problem of maximizing the seller's revenue does not admit an FPTAS unless P=NP, even for basic instances with a single buyer. As a result, in the rest of the paper, we focus on designing PTASs. In order to do so, we first introduce a unifying framework encompassing both public and private signaling, whose core result is a decomposition lemma that allows focusing on a finite set of possible buyers' posteriors. This forms the basis on which our PTASs are developed. In particular, in the public signaling setting, our PTAS employs some ad hoc techniques based on linear programming, while our PTAS for the private setting relies on the ellipsoid method to solve an exponentially-sized LP in polynomial time. In the latter case, we need a custom approximate separation oracle, which we implement with a dynamic programming approach