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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Order And Creativity In Virtual Worlds, Evan W. Osborne, Shu Z. Schiller Oct 2009

Order And Creativity In Virtual Worlds, Evan W. Osborne, Shu Z. Schiller

Economics Faculty Publications

Economies are driven by dynamic creativity, but some sorts of creativity, especially if predatory, can destroy an economy. This tradeoff has been known for centuries to political philosophers who have analyzed physical space, but has not been addressed in virtual space. Like physical economies, virtual economies face the tradeoff of encouraging freedom to experiment, while discouraging experiments that damage society. Physical societies solve this problem both through encouraging competition and giving government the unique power to punish destructive activities. In virtual societies, this tradeoff has yet to be adequately assessed. Guided by the economic modeling of order and creativity, in …


Stakeholder Views On Improving Border Management, Donald K. Alper, Bryant Hammond Jan 2009

Stakeholder Views On Improving Border Management, Donald K. Alper, Bryant Hammond

Border Policy Research Institute Publications

The Canada-US border, like all international borders, performs certain functions related to restricting, regulating and interdicting cross-border flows of people, products and pollutants. How border officials carry out these functions is shaped by historical factors and the political-economic agendas of state authorities. Though Canada-US border management has always been influenced by security issues such as boundary disputes, prohibition and illicit drugs, only since 9/11 has the border been viewed as a vital security problem in the context of American national security. This new reality has brought increased attention to the northern border and prompted a continuing debate about the appropriate …


Bilateral Cooperation And Bounded Sovereignty In Counter-Terrorism Efforts, Bidisha Biswas Jan 2009

Bilateral Cooperation And Bounded Sovereignty In Counter-Terrorism Efforts, Bidisha Biswas

Border Policy Research Institute Publications

The ‘Global War on Terror,’ led by the United States, emphasizes the role of international alliances in tackling terrorist threats. By their very nature, international counterterrorism efforts challenge state sovereignty by requiring changes to both foreign and domestic policies. This, in turn, creates complex sovereignty issues and raises some interesting questions for closer examination. How has cooperation in counterterrorism altered the perceptions and behavior of allies of the United States? Has the post-9/11 security environment constrained the sovereignty of other nations? This paper will analyze Canada’s cooperation with the US in order to explore these questions. The study argues that …


Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante Jan 2009

Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante

Research Collection School Of Economics

In order to explain the apparently paradoxical presence of acceptable governance in many non-democratic regimes, economists and political scientists have focused mostly on institutions acting as de facto checks and balances. In this paper, we propose that population plays a similar role in guaranteeing the quality of governance and redistribution. We argue and demonstrate with historical evidence that the concentration of population around the policy making center serves as an insurgency threat to a dictatorship, inducing it to yield to more redistribution and better governance. We bring this centered concept of population concentration to the data through the Centered Index …


The University As Constructed Cultural Commons, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg Jan 2009

The University As Constructed Cultural Commons, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg

Articles

This paper examines commons as socially constructed environments built via and alongside intellectual property rights systems. We sketch a theoretical framework for examining cultural commons across a broad variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts, and we apply that framework to the university and associated practices and institutions.