Interplay between security providers, consumers, and attackers: a weighted congestion game approach

Network users can choose among different security solutions to protect their data. Those solutions are offered by competing providers, with possibly different performance and price levels. In this paper, we model the interactions among users as a noncooperative game, with a negative externality coming from the fact that attackers target popular systems to maximize their expected gain. Using a nonatomic weighted congestion game model for user interactions, we prove the existence and uniqueness of a user equilibrium, compute the corresponding Price of Anarchy, that is the loss of efficiency due to user selfishness, and investigate some consequences for the (higher-level) pricing game played by security providers.Game theory;Weighted games; Security

Feminist Interventions in Political Representation in the United States and Canada: Training Programs and Legal Quotas

While many countries have adopted quota laws to regulate the election of women to political office, the United States and Canada seem unaffected by this trend. In this article, I seek an explanation for this and examine the role of women's movements and some of the initiatives launched over the last 25 years to counter the problem of low numbers of elected women in Canadian and American parliaments. I examine features common to the approaches of American and Canadian women's movements, both of which are characterized by a strong emphasis on training for political office and an absence of mobilization in favor of legal quotas. Women's groups involved in the promotion of women in politics in the U.S. and Canada do not support the strategy of legal quota implementation; rather, one type of intervention is favored over all others: training programs. I conclude that the absence of campaigns for legal quotas in Canada and the United States can be linked to the lack of mobilization for quotas on the part of women's organizations. However, from a feminist perspective, training programs for women who want to run for office are grounded in problematic assumptions