Side-Payments and the Costs of Conflict.

Conflict and competition often impose costs on both winners and losers, and conflicting parties may prefer to resolve the dispute before it occurs. The equilibrium of a conflict game with side-payments predicts that with binding offers, proposers make and responders accept side-payments, generating settlements that strongly favor proposers. When side-payments are non-binding, proposers offer nothing and conflicts always arise. Laboratory experiments confirm that binding side-payments reduce conflicts. However, 30% of responders reject binding offers, and offers are more egalitarian than predicted. Surprisingly, non-binding side-payments also improve efficiency, although less than binding. With binding side-payments, 87% of efficiency gains come from avoided conflicts. However, with non-binding side-payments, only 39% of gains come from avoided conflicts and 61% from reduced conflict expenditures.contests, conflict resolution, side-payments, experiments

Wearable Methodologies for the Internet

Many end-users would agree that, had it not been for scatter/gather I/O, the analysis of A* search might never have occurred. After years of robust research into B-trees, we argue the exploration of DHTs. MOORUK, our new application for web browsers, is the solution to all of these grand challenges

Resolving Conflicts by a Random Device

We examine conflict resolution via a random device. We model conflict as a two-agent rent-seeking contest for a fixed prize. Before conflict arises, both agents may agree to allocate the prize by coin flip to avoid the costs of conflict. In equilibrium, risk-neutral agents with relatively symmetric conflict capabilities agree to resolve the conflict by randomization. However, with sufficiently asymmetric capabilities, conflicts are unavoidable because the stronger agent prefers to fight. Laboratory experiments confirm that the availability of the random device partially eliminates conflicts when agents are relatively symmetric; however, the device also reduces conflict between substantially asymmetric agents.Beauty contest, conflict resolution, experiments

ON ILLOCUTIONARY LOGIC AS A TELECOMMUNICATIONS LANGUAGE

Interorganizational telecommunications-mediated messages are nearly always expressed either in natural language (via telephone, telex, electronic mail, etc) or through specific protocols developed for the application at hand. Natural language expression is powerful, flexible, equivocal, and not generally machine readable. Specific protocols have a limited expressive power, are inflexible, can be unequivocal, and are machine readable. This paper commences an exploration of the possibility of using a formal language for interorganizational messaging. Such a strategy promises to combine the virtues of natural language and of specific protocols for communication. Formal logic is a natural basis for such a language. Recent developments in illocutionary logic (an extension of predicate logic) bid fair to provide a sound basis for a formal language for business communications. The paper discusses these concepts and how they might be implemented

Why Can’t We Be Friends? Entitlements and the Costs of Conflict

We design an experiment to explore the impact of earned entitlements on the frequency and intensity of conflicts in a two-stage conflict game where players may attempt to use non-binding side-payments to avoid conflict. In this game, Proposers make offers and Responders decide simultaneously whether to accept the offers and whether to engage in a conflict. A simple theoretical analysis suggests that Proposers should never offer side-payments because Responders should always accept them and then still choose to enter conflict; however, our experiment reveals that some individuals use this non-binding mechanism to avoid conflict. Moreover, when subjects earn their roles (Proposer or Responder), conflicts are 44% more likely to be avoided than when roles are assigned randomly. Earned entitlements impact behavior in three important ways: (1) Proposers who have earned their position persistently make larger offers; (2) larger offers lead to a lower probability of conflict, but (3) Proposers whose offers do not lead to conflict resolution respond spitefully with greater conflict expenditure. Hence, with earned rights, the positive welfare effects of reduced conflict frequency are offset by higher conflict intensity. This result differs from previous experimental evidence from ultimatum games in which earned entitlements tend to encourage agreement and increase welfare; thus, our findings highlight the important consequences of endogenizing the costs of conflict. Our analysis suggests that earned entitlements alter behavior by influencing the beliefs of Proposers about the willingness of Responders to accept a peaceful resolution. As a result, these Proposers make persistent high offers, and when their beliefs are disappointed by a Responder’s decision to accept a side-payment and still enter conflict, they retaliate

Side-Payments and the Costs of Conflict

Conflict and competition often impose costs on both winners and losers, and conflicting parties may prefer to resolve the dispute before it occurs. The equilibrium of a conflict game with side-payments predicts that with binding offers, proposers make and responders accept side-payments, generating settlements that strongly favor proposers. When side-payments are non-binding, proposers offer nothing and conflicts always arise. Laboratory experiments confirm that binding side-payments reduce conflicts. However, 30% of responders reject binding offers, and offers are more egalitarian than predicted. Surprisingly, non-binding side-payments also improve efficiency, although less than binding. With binding side-payments, 87% of efficiency gains come from avoided conflicts. However, with non-binding side-payments, only 39% of gains come from avoided conflicts and 61% from reduced conflict expenditures

Staffing practices, professional preparation trends, and demographics among student affairs administrators at HBCUs: Implications from a national study

Results from a national demographic study of student affairs administrators at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are presented in this article. Specifically, staffing practices in student affairs divisions and the educational backgrounds and aspirations of directors, senior student affairs administrators, and chief student affairs officers (n=270) were examined. Data from 52 four-year institutions show that HBCU student affairs administrators, especially those at the director level, hold advanced degrees in fields other than student affairs and higher education administration. More than 70% of those without doctoral degrees aspired to pursue them someday. Other findings reveal gender disparities between women and men at the highest levels of administration; racial homogeneity across all levels; and a nearly exclusive reliance on local recruitment methods to fill administrative positions. Implications for student affairs divisions at HBCUs, as well as graduate preparation programs and national student affairs professional associations, are offered at the end of the article

Performative, Informative and Emotive Systems The First Piece of the PIE

This paper distinguishes computer and communications systems that\u27perform\u27 fr om those that\u27inform\u27 and those that deal with emotive aspects of problems. It indicates some of the ways that peformative systems seem to differ from the other kinds, why this distinction is important to both users and designers, and suggests research-some of it currently underway-to investigate this area. Results from this research will allow us to improve existing performative systems and to expand the domain of their application

UHB demonstrator interior noise control flight tests and analysis

The measurement and analysis of MD-UHB (McDonnell Douglas Ultra High Bypass) Demonstrator noise and vibration flight test data are described as they relate to passenger cabin noise. The analyses were done to investigate the interior noise characteristics of advanced turboprop aircraft with aft-mounted engines, and to study the effectiveness of selected noise control treatments in reducing passenger cabin noise. The UHB Demonstrator is an MD-80 test aircraft with the left JT8D engine replaced with a prototype UHB engine. For these tests, the UHB engine was a General Electric Unducted Fan, with either 8x8 or 10x8 counter-rotating propeller configurations. Interior noise level characteristics were studied for several altitudes and speeds, with emphasis on high altitude (35,000 ft), high speed (0.75 Mach) cruise conditions. The effectiveness of several noise control treatments was evaluated based on cabin noise measurements. The important airborne and structureborne transmission paths were identified for both tonal and broadband sources using the results of a sound intensity survey, exterior and interior noise and vibration data, and partial coherence analysis techniques. Estimates of the turbulent boundary layer pressure wavenumber-frequency spectrum were made, based on measured fuselage noise levels

Infanticide and Human Self Domestication

Our hypothesis, which is largely complementary to Wrangham, is that band elders engaged in infanticide and direct and indirect child homicide against the offspring of reactive aggressive adults through decisions during the foraging period of the Middle and Upper Pleistocene. We hypothesize that elders may have targeted the offspring of reactively aggressive males (and females) as retaliation for behaviors that were not good for the elders or their offspring and because surreptitiously killing the offspring of violent males was much less dangerous to the elders than killing the violent males. Such retaliation could have selected against reactive aggression as a genetic consequence. In other words, infanticide could have been Wrangham\u27s “different stimulus” initiating HSD. Our argument is that the earliest language of single words (kill), and certainly the crude compounds, “kill-baby or “like father” and “like son,” would be enough to organize the “execution of an infant” in a relatively secluded birthing site. Infanticide effectively becomes a second moment of mate choice. Such an action could have been relatively safely concealed since an infant dying in childbirth in forager socio-ecological conditions was likely not unusual (see below). The relative simplicity of the language capacities necessary for infanticide contrasts with the more sophisticated language necessary to organize a safe coup and execution of a reactively aggressive alpha male