Mobile license renewal : what are the issues? what is at stake ?

A major challenge facing regulators in industrial and developing countries alike is the need to strike the right balance between ensuring certainty for market players and preserving flexibility of the regulatory process to accommodate the rapidly changing market, technological, and policy conditions. This challenge applies across a wide range of regulatory instruments and vehicles including license renewal, which is the focus of this paper. The authors provide an overview of mobile license renewal issues covering the legal regime of license renewal, the renewal process, the non-renewal context, and the changes in licensing conditions, including spectrum implications of the renewal process. They draw best practices that started to emerge in recent renewal practices, to ensure that the renewal process leads to the best outcome for all stakeholders. As much as possible, policymakers and regulators should strive to promote investors'confidence and give incentives for long-term investment. They can do this by favoring the principle of"renewal expectancy,"but also by promoting regulatory certainty and predictability through a fair, transparent, and participatory renewal process. For example, by providing details for license renewal or reissue, clearly establishing what is the discretion offered to the licensing body, or ensuring sufficient lead-times and transitional arrangements in the event of non-renewal or changes in licensing conditions. Public consultation procedures and guaranteeing the right to appeal regulatory decisions maximizes the prospects for a successful renewal process. As technological changes and convergence and technologically neutral approaches gain importance, regulators and policymakers need to be ready to adapt and evolve licensing procedures and practices to the new environment.Industrial Management,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Technology Industry,Urban Economics,Public&Municipal Finance

Telecommunications and the World Trade Organization : the case of Mexico

The U.S.-Mexico case (2002-04) was the first (and so far only) case of World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute resolution on telecommunications services and the first on services only. The findings of the Panel charged with settling the dispute contain interpretations of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), especially its Annex on Telecommunications and the Reference Paper that sets regulatory principles. Although these interpretations strictly apply only to the case examined, they have implications for other countries and sectors and beyond trade law. The following are some of the findings. Telecommunications services originated in one country and terminated in another country are cross-border services under the GATS irrespective of whether the same service provider is present in both countries. The accounting rate regime, whereby operators share revenue from international services provided jointly, is subject to the discipline of cost-based interconnection for countries that have adopted the Reference Paper. Uniform settlement rates and proportional return are anticompetitive practices under the Reference Paper even when they are mandated by law. The lack of implementing regulations does not excuse the country from meeting its commitments under the GATS. Mexico and the United States, although not in full agreement with the Panel, did not appeal. An agreed plan to address the underlying legal and regulatory issues was successfully implemented in July 2005.ICT Policy and Strategies,Economic Theory&Research,Rural Communications,Trade and Services,Education for the Knowledge Economy

A Distance-Based Decision in the Credal Level

Belief function theory provides a flexible way to combine information provided by different sources. This combination is usually followed by a decision making which can be handled by a range of decision rules. Some rules help to choose the most likely hypothesis. Others allow that a decision is made on a set of hypotheses. In [6], we proposed a decision rule based on a distance measure. First, in this paper, we aim to demonstrate that our proposed decision rule is a particular case of the rule proposed in [4]. Second, we give experiments showing that our rule is able to decide on a set of hypotheses. Some experiments are handled on a set of mass functions generated randomly, others on real databases

‘A man is known by the company he keeps’: A critical overview of semantic prosody

The discipline of corpus linguistics has revolutionized the study of language in a variety of ways. In this respect, semantic prosody is one of the rapidly evolving research streams that encapsulates the incorporation of digital technology into linguistic research and deserves more scholarly attention. The paper aims to offer new insights into the study of this theoretical concept. It presents a critical review of the existing literature, delineating the major merits and challenges of this area of inquiry, and suggests novel research avenues. This article has theoretical and practical implications for the future research agenda on semantic prosody. It underscores the importance of endowing this corpus linguistics concept with more clarity and consistency as to its labeling, conceptualization, and delimitation. The paper also proposes some new applications pertaining to the investigation of the discursive construction of human referents across different text types

Trolls Identification within an Uncertain Framework

The web plays an important role in people's social lives since the emergence of Web 2.0. It facilitates the interaction between users, gives them the possibility to freely interact, share and collaborate through social networks, online communities forums, blogs, wikis and other online collaborative media. However, an other side of the web is negatively taken such as posting inflammatory messages. Thus, when dealing with the online communities forums, the managers seek to always enhance the performance of such platforms. In fact, to keep the serenity and prohibit the disturbance of the normal atmosphere, managers always try to novice users against these malicious persons by posting such message (DO NOT FEED TROLLS). But, this kind of warning is not enough to reduce this phenomenon. In this context we propose a new approach for detecting malicious people also called 'Trolls' in order to allow community managers to take their ability to post online. To be more realistic, our proposal is defined within an uncertain framework. Based on the assumption consisting on the trolls' integration in the successful discussion threads, we try to detect the presence of such malicious users. Indeed, this method is based on a conflict measure of the belief function theory applied between the different messages of the thread. In order to show the feasibility and the result of our approach, we test it in different simulated data.Comment: International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence - ICTAI , Nov 2014, Limassol, Cypru

Belief Approach for Social Networks

Nowadays, social networks became essential in information exchange between individuals. Indeed, as users of these networks, we can send messages to other people according to the links connecting us. Moreover, given the large volume of exchanged messages, detecting the true nature of the received message becomes a challenge. For this purpose, it is interesting to consider this new tendency with reasoning under uncertainty by using the theory of belief functions. In this paper, we tried to model a social network as being a network of fusion of information and determine the true nature of the received message in a well-defined node by proposing a new model: the belief social network

L'influence des variables psychosociales sur la décision de communication volontaire : cas des dirigeants tunisiens

International audienceDisclosure decisions are made based on managerial choice (Williams, 2008). But the question of their motives remains always posed. This research proposes to be centred on the behaviors of the managers explaining the voluntary disclosure of information. Taking root in the conceptual model of the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991), the developed model proposes 3 variables namely: the attitude, the subjective norm as well as the perceived behavioral control. Based on an investigation with the managers of 39 listed Tunisian firms (rate of answer of 70.9%), the results show that the attitude of the manager toward the communication on the future strategy of the company, its earnings forecasts and the reasons of the decrease of its dividends significantly predicts its intention to disclose this information. On the other hand, neither the subjective norm and nor its perception of control influence its decision to disclose.Les décisions de divulgations sont prises sur la base d'un choix managérial (Williams, 2008). Mais la question de leurs motivations reste toujours posée. Cette recherche se propose de se centrer sur les comportements des dirigeants expliquant la divulgation volontaire d'informations. Prenant racine dans le modèle conceptuel de la théorie du comportement planifié (Ajzen, 1991), le modèle développé met en avant 3 variables à savoir : l'attitude, la norme subjective ainsi que la perception du contrôle. Basés sur une enquête auprès des dirigeants de 39 entreprises tunisiennes cotées (taux de réponse de 70,9%), les résultats montrent que l'attitude du dirigeant à l'égard de la communication sur la stratégie future de l'entreprise, ses résultats prévisionnels et les raisons de la baisse de ses dividendes prédit significativement son intention de divulguer ces informations. Par contre, ni la norme subjective et ni sa perception du contrôle n'influencent sa décision de divulguer