Institutional Collective Action and Local Goverance

This paper elaborates the institutional collective action framework and its applications to cooperative interlocal service agreements among governments in metropolitan areas. It begins by outlining the information, negotiation, enforcement and agency cost that pose obstacles to cooperative interlocal arrangements. Next it identifies how these transaction costs, and the ability of local actors to overcome them, depend on: 1) characteristics of services; 2) characteristics of communities; 3) political institutions; and 4) structures of policy networks. Specific propositions regarding evolution and effectiveness of interlocal cooperation are advanced and an agenda to investigate institutional collective action among local governments is presented

Interlocal Cooperation in the Supply of Local Public Goods: A Transaction Cost and Social Exchange Explanation

Although a multiplicity of local governments is often regarded as promoting efficiency in the supply of public services, political fragmentation can generate economies of scale and externality problems. Several exogenous solutions, including the creation of overlapping districts governments, consolidation of existing units and establishment of a metropolitan government, or direct state or federal intervention, have been offered. We argue that cooperative governance offers a potential endogenous solution to this dilemma. By combining transaction cost and social exchange theories within the institutional collective action framework, we investigate how local governments themselves address inefficiencies from externalities and economies of scale. An empirical analysis of Georgia cities reports that while cities’ choice of service collaboration is affected by the transaction characteristics of services, their level of service collaboration is greatly influenced by the previous exchange that builds trust and by the level of fiscal pressure they face

Pin++: An Object-oriented Framework for Writing Pintools

This paper presents a framework named Pin++. Pin++ is an object-oriented framework that uses template metaprogramming to implement Pintools, which are analysis tools for the dynamic binary instrumentation tool named Pin. The goal of Pin++ is to simplify programming a Pintool and promote reuse of its components across different Pintools. Our results show that Pintools implemented using Pin++ can have a 54% reduction in complexity, increase its modularity, and up to 60% reduction in instrumentation overhead

Competitors and Cooperators: A Micro‐Level Analysis of Regional Economic Development Collaboration Networks

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90044/1/j.1540-6210.2011.02501.x.pd

CORBA-JS: An Open-Standards Framework for Distributed Object Computing over the Web

poster abstractDistributed object computing (DOC) is a well-established software engineering paradigm for implementing distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems, such as real-time monitoring systems. Likewise, CORBA is a well-established DOC open-standard used in DRE systems. Due to many technological limitations, DOC was traditionally unavailable in Web-based applications (i.e., stateful applications that communicate over HTTP, and are accessible via a Web browser) without the use of proprietary, custom technologies. The problem with using proprietary, custom technology is it creates fragmentation in the solution space where some solutions are not available to all end-users (e.g., Web sites that only work within a certain Web browser because of the used technology). With the advent of HTML5 and WebSockets, which is an open-standard for enabling two-way communication over HTTP, DOC now has the necessary technological foundations to be realized within Web applications without the use of proprietary, custom technologies. To date, however, no researchers have attempted to apply DOC over HTTP using well-established DOC open-standards, such as CORBA. This research therefore is an initial investigation into implementing CORBA atop of HTML5 and WebSockets. As part of this research, we are investigating the challenges in realizing the solution, and proposing ways to improve the target programming languages and CORBA specification. Doing so will enable developers to create feature-rich real-time Web applications that improve upon current state-of-the-art approaches, e.g., Asynchronous XML and JavaScript (AJAX), that are resource intensive (e.g., use a lot of CPU, network bandwidth, and memory) and hard to program