International Standards of Penitentiary Activity: Impact on the Development of the Penitentiary Activity of the CIS Countries

Overcrowding in prisons is a common problem that affects many countries. It is difficult to define this term because there is no single internationally accepted standard. This article presents a comparative study of international standards for the activities of doctors in penitentiary institutions as an integral part of international standards of penitentiary activity. The authors investigated the methods and the degree of their impact on the penitentiary legislation of the Russian Federation and other CIS countries. The conclusion is drawn about the positive role of such standards in improving the national penitentiary legislation in order to increase the level of medical care for prisoners

On the nature of financial leverage

The article presents a translation of some widespread financial terminology into the language of decision theory. For instance, financial leverage can be regarded as an object of choice or a decision. We show how the optics of decision theory allows perceiving the recently introduced metrics of see-through-leverage, which proved to be very useful in understanding the phenomenology of the recent economic crisis. The importance for practical decision making of specification of the statistical regularity of the random phenomena at hand as well as of the rationality class of the decision maker is discussed.

Price as a matter of choice and nonstochastic randomness

A version of indifference valuation of a European call option is proposed that includes statistical regularities of nonstochastic randomness. Classical relations (forward contract value and Black-Scholes formula) are obtained as particular cases. We show that in the general case of nonstochastic randomness the minimal expected profit of uncovered European option position is always negative. A version of delta hedge is proposed.