1,721,050 research outputs found
Are stable agreements for sharing international river waters now possible?
Full text linkInternational river and lake basins constitute about 47 percent of the world's continental land area, a proportion that increases to about 60 percent in Africa, Asia, and South America. Because water is a scarce and increasingly valuable resource, disputes about water allocation within these basins often contribute to regional tensions and conflicts. May principles of international law have been developed to allocate water within a water basin and to prevent or resolve international water disputes. Unfortunately, they rarely are easy to apply and often are contradictory. Sharing river water is particularly difficult because the effects are one-way, with upstream-downstream supply disputes have been among the most common. Agreements about the allocation of river water often last only until the first drought, when reduced flow denies some their full shares. The authors develop a simple formal model of water allocation among states within a river basin. They analyze the model in the context of variable flow rates, to project the behavior of riparian states during periods of above-normal and below-normal flow. Their objective: to understand when, where, and how much the economic interests of the states conflict, to develop principles guaranteeing efficient allocations of scarce water supplies, and to identify when stable (self-enforcing) allocation agreements are possible. They also consider the possibility of using alternative sources of supply and of accommodating growth in demand. Satellite technology will soon dramatically improve the ability of riparian states to predict annual flow volumes. In addition, water basin authorities will have real-time data on riparians'water use. These developments will have important implications for the enforceability and the flexibility of river water allocation systems. This model shows how flexibility can be used to construct more durable systems for sharing water among riparian states. The new allocation methods proposed here should contribute to the better management of scarce water supplies, a crucial issue in an increasingly thirsty world.Water and Industry,Water Conservation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Supply and Systems,Decentralization,Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Water Conservation,Water and Industry,Environmental Economics&Policies
Satisfaction approval voting
Full text linkWe propose a new voting system, satisfaction approval voting (SAV), for multiwinner elections, in which voters can approve of as many candidates or as many parties as they like. However, the winners are not those who receive the most votes, as under approval voting (AV), but those who maximize the sum of the satisfaction scores of all voters, where a voter’s satisfaction score is the fraction of his or her approved candidates who are elected. SAV may give a different outcome from A--in fact, SAV and AV outcomes may be disjoint—but SAV generally chooses candidates representing more diverse interests than does AV (this is demonstrated empirically in the case of a recent election of the Game Theory Society). A decision-theoretic analysis shows that all strategies except approving of a least-preferred candidate are undominated, so voters will often find it optimal to approve of more than one candidate. In party-list systems, SAV apportions seats to parties according to the Jefferson/d’Hondt method with a quota constraint, which favors large parties and gives an incentive to smaller parties to coordinate their policies and forge alliances, even before an election, that reflect their supporters’ coalitional preferences.multiwinner election; voting system; approval ballot; proportional representation; apportonment
How democracy resolves conflict in difficult games
Full text linkDemocracy resolves conflicts in difficult games like Prisoners’ Dilemma and Chicken by stabilizing their cooperative outcomes. It does so by transforming these games into games in which voters are presented with a choice between a cooperative outcome and a Pareto-inferior noncooperative outcome. In the transformed game, it is always rational for voters to vote for the cooperative outcome, because cooperation is a weakly dominant strategy independent of the decision rule and the number of voters who choose it. Such games are illustrated by 2-person and n-person public-goods games, in which it is optimal to be a free rider, and a biblical story from the book of Exodus.Democracy; voting; social choice; public goods; game theory; Prisoners' Dilemma; Bible
Looking back on a framework for thinking about group support systems
No full textThis chapter is an update to the thinking framework for Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) proposed by Colin Eden 30 years ago. As the source paper, this chapter is a personal take on the topic, however it is a personal take rooted in substantial experience in the broad area of decision making and modelling and in some specific narrow areas of decision support. There have been major developments in the broad context surrounding GDSS, including the improved understanding of decisions on the conceptual side, and many aspects of computer development, such as artificial intelligence and big data on the technical side. Considering the volume of these changes it is surprising how much the observations, arguments and conclusions offered in the source paper are still valid today. The most important component of any GDSS is still the facilitator, and the most valuable ingredients of the GDSS process are the participants’ intuitions, creativity, opinions, arguments, agendas, personalities, networks. The outcome of the GDSS process is only valuable if it is politically feasible. Today we have a better understanding of transitional objects and their role in the GDSS process; their significance is the second after the facilitator. Artificial intelligence can be useful for GDSS in several different ways, but it cannot replace the facilitator
Knowledge Acquisition Using Group Decision Support Systems
No full textThis paper reports on a project in which a Group Support System (GSS) was used to ‘acquire knowledge’ from seven European cities with respect to the interactions between risk events faced by the cities. The aim of the project was to develop a Risk Systemicity Questionnaire (RSQ) which is an interactive tool designed to support cities in improving their resilience. A series of GSS workshops was organized in which participants co-created the risk scenarios that formed the main content of the tool. This paper presents an approach to using a GSS to inform specific research questions rather than to develop new solutions which participants can take ownership of and implement immediately in their work. In turn, the use of GSS in such non-traditional context poses a number of important methodological considerations of which GSS facilitators should be aware
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