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Objectives: Understanding how covert networks are formed is key to disrupting the operation of illicit activities. Applying standard network measures to a covert network, while useful, is limited in identifying the peculiar properties of the network in question. It is important that we compare the covert network against a benchmark, be it random networks or, more ideally, the counterpart (overt) network in the same context. We report a study in collaboration with law enforcement agency to examine the co-voyage network of criminals and non-criminals. A comparison of the two groups of actors in their network positions allows us to test whether criminals tend to blend in or hide out from the population of non-criminals. Methods: Drawing on data on maritime activities in Taiwan recorded from years 2016 to 2018, we map a maritime co-voyage network of 53,009 nodes and 2,592,288 weighted links. We follow a bootstrap resampling procedure to estimate the structural features of the co-voyage networks of criminals and non-criminals. Results: Criminals are more likely to co-voyage with their own type than non-criminals. Similarly, criminals are more clustered in the co-voyage network than non-criminals. Conclusions: It is more supported that criminals segregate from than blend in non-criminals in the co-voyage network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationale: Nicotine is a principal psychoactive agent in tobacco, contributing to tobacco's addictive potential. Preclinical studies on the effects of voluntary nicotine intake typically use self-administration procedures that provide continuous nicotine access during each self-administration session. However, many smokers consume cigarettes intermittently rather than continuously throughout each day. For drugs including cocaine and opioids, research in laboratory rats shows that intermittent intake can be more effective than continuous intake in producing patterns of drug use relevant to addiction. Objective: We determined how intermittent versus continuous nicotine self-administration influences nicotine seeking and taking behaviours. Methods: Female and male rats had continuous (i.e., Long Access; LgA, 6 h/day) or intermittent (IntA; 12 min ON, 60 min OFF, for 6 h/day) access to intravenous nicotine (15 µg/kg/infusion), for 12 daily sessions. We then assessed intake, responding for nicotine under a progressive ratio schedule of drug reinforcement and cue- and nicotine-induced reinstatement of drug seeking. We also estimated nicotine pharmacokinetic parameters during LgA and IntA self-administration. Results: Overall, LgA rats took twice more nicotine than did IntA rats, yielding more sustained increases in estimated brain concentrations of the drug. However, the two groups showed similar motivation to seek and take nicotine, as measured using reinstatement and progressive ratio procedures, respectively. Conclusions: Intermittent nicotine use is just as effective as continuous use in producing addiction-relevant behaviours, despite significantly less nicotine exposure. This has implications for modeling nicotine self-administration patterns in human smokers and resulting effects on brain and behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Staphylococcus aureus, the principal causative agent of osteomyelitis, can be internalized by osteoblasts and thereby escape from immune phagocytes and many kinds of antibiotics. To deliver antibiotics into osteoblasts to kill S. aureus in the intracellular environment, we developed gentamicin-loaded chitosan nanoparticles and evaluated their intracellular bactericidal effect. We found decreased numbers of S. aureus cells in infected osteoblasts treated with gentamicin-loaded chitosan nanoparticles. The cytotoxicity of the nanoparticles was evaluated by CCK-8 assay. There was no significant viability decrease at all tested concentrations. In conclusion, our results provide evidence for the potential use of gentamicin-loaded chitosan nanoparticles to enhance the delivery of gentamicin into cells and for their antibacterial effect against internalized S. aureus in the intracellular environment of osteoblasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a class of reinsurance contracting problems is examined under a continuous-time principal–agent framework with mean-variance criteria, where a reinsurer and an insurer are assigned the roles of the principal and the agent, respectively. Both parties can manage their insurance risk by investing in a financial portfolio comprising a risk-free asset and a risky asset. It has been assumed that both the insurer and the reinsurer are concerned about model uncertainty and that they aim to find a robust reinsurance contract and robust investment strategies by maximizing their respective mean-variance cost functionals taking sets of probability scenarios into account. To articulate the time-inconsistency issue attributed to the mean-variance optimization criteria, the optimization procedure of each decision-maker has been formulated as a non-cooperative game and discussed by using an extended HJB equation, which is consistent with the extant work on time-consistent control. Moreover, explicit expressions for the robust reinsurance contract, the robust investment strategies and the value functions of the insurer and reinsurer have been obtained and presented. The numerical results and their economic interpretations are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, policymakers and scholars argued that state education agencies (SEAs) should move away from simply acting as compliance monitors and take on more prominent roles as providers of technical support to schools and school districts. Scholars find that SEAs have struggled to do so, yet there is little empirical work to explain what SEAs do or why they struggle. This study looks at Michigan's Partnership model for School and District turnaround, which began in 2018 and includes the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) as a formal partner in building the capacity of school districts to craft and meet ambitious student learning targets. Analyzing interviews with MDE "liaisons" and turnaround leaders, I find that Partnership leaders reported a deeper sense of trust with the SEA compared to prior years because liaisons were more focused on support and understanding individual school/district contexts. However, supports were generally "passive" (e.g., sending standardized emails with resources/links; helping navigate compliance issues) rather than targeted technical assistance that helped Partnership leaders build capacity. I argue that this was in part due to the SEA's conflicting role as both accountability monitor and technical assistance provider. I show how SEAs navigated this dynamic and provide suggestions for how SEAs can balance district autonomy with support through trust building, ideas of "controlled autonomy," and "flexible specificity," which recommends highly specific technical guidance paired with ongoing processes of feedback and experimentation from implementers so that guidance matches context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of empirical papers document the coexistence of exclusive and nonexclusive contracts within a given market across a multitude of industries. However, the theoretical literature has not been able to generate a differentiable model with the coexistence of these contracts. I rectify the gap in the literature by developing a theoretical model of two-sided matching, in which principals and agents choose between exclusive and nonexclusive contracts with cost-of-effort inefficiencies. I find that the coexistence of contracts relies on cost-sharing between principals, relative bargaining power, and an endogenous outside option. I also find that the pattern of contracts is monotonic with respect to the type distributions of principals and agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines the issues that will determine the future of the major questions doctrine (MQD), one of the most controversial doctrines in the administrative law canon. Topics discussed include the best attribute of MQD, MQD's triggers and ontologies, and the pending domain issues including guidance documents, enforcement actions, and agency adjudications.

Whose preferences influence the design of international institutions? Scholarship on the legalization of international politics and creation of international legal institutions largely adopts a state-centric perspective. Existing accounts, however, fail to recognize how states often delegate authority over institutional design tasks to independent legal experts whose preferences may diverge from those of states. We develop a principal–agent (PA) framework for theorizing relations between states (collective principals) and legal actors (agents) in the design process, and for explaining how legal actors influence the design of international institutions. The legal dimensions of the PA relationship increase the likelihood of preference divergence between the collective principal and the agent, but also create conditions that enable the agent to opportunistically advance its own design preferences. We argue that the more information on states' preferences the agent has, the more effectively it can exploit its legal expertise to strategically select and justify design choices that maximize its own preferences and the likelihood of states' acceptance. Our analysis of two cases of delegated institutional design concerning international criminal law at the United Nations and the African Union supports our theoretical expectations. Extensive archival and interview data elucidate how agents' variable information on states' preferences affects their ability to effectively advance their design preferences. Our theory reveals how independent legal experts with delegated authority over design tasks influence institutional design processes and outcomes, which has practical and normative implications for the legalization of international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charter school authorizers shape which charter schools open, where they open, and who they serve. We draw on principal agent theory to investigate how the priorities and practices of nine authorizers intersected with charter school applications' attention to the needs of historically marginalized students. Using data from interviews and applications, we find authorizers vary in orientations toward equity and the ways in which they signal that orientation to charter applicants. Our analysis suggests a robust relationship between authorizer mission and the content found in charter applications, demonstrating the influence of authorizing practices on the contents of charter school applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a moral hazard framework, an agent considers undertaking a task of uncertain difficulty. An immediate disclosure of the task's difficulty by the principal convinces the agent to perform only easy tasks. By contrast, information design theory predicts that delayed disclosure can induce the agent to continue working even when the work turns out to be challenging. Our experimental evidence confirms that delayed disclosure outperforms immediate disclosure and no disclosure, as theory predicts, but only if immediate disclosure is not available. However, when the principal is faced with the choice between the two policies and chooses delayed disclosure over immediate disclosure, the superiority of delayed disclosure disappears due to the agent's intention-based reciprocity towards the principal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mannheimia haemolytica is the principal agent contributing to bovine respiratory disease and can form biofilms with increased resistance to antibiotic treatment and host immune defenses. To investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying M. haemolytica biofilm formation, transcriptomic analyses were performed with mRNAs sequenced from planktonic and biofilm cultures of pathogenic serotypes 1 (St 1; strain D153) and St 6 (strain D174), and St 2 (strain D35). The three M. haemolytica serotypes were cultured in two different media, Roswell Park Memorial Institute (RPMI) 1640 and brain heart infusion (BHI) to form the biofilms. Transcriptomic analyses revealed that the functions of the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in biofilm associated cells were not significantly affected by the two media. A total of 476 to 662 DEGs were identified between biofilm associated cells and planktonic cells cultured under BHI medium. Functional analysis of the DEGs indicated that those genes were significantly enriched in translation and many biosynthetic processes. There were 234 DEGs identified in St 1 and 6, but not in St 2. The functions of the DEGs included structural constituents of ribosomes, transmembrane proton transportation, proton channels, and proton-transporting ATP synthase. Potentially, some of the DEGs identified in this study provide insight into the design of new M. haemolytica vaccine candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amazon vans and Uber drivers frequently crash into other cars. Despite the many injuries and deaths that result from these accidents, Amazon and Uber deny responsibility for such claims because they categorize their drivers as "independent contractors." But this contractor defense distorts the basic rules of agency law. Over a century ago, courts crafted agency standards that forced businesses to pay for the harms that their workers caused. Since that time, American firms have attempted to skirt this rule by labeling their workers as "contractors" rather than as "employees." Aware of this age-old tactic to avoid liability, courts historically built sufficient flexibility into agency standards to hold companies responsible for injuries to others, even when ostensible "contractors" committed those torts. In the years to come, a growing number of drivers for Amazon, Uber, and other on-demand firms will hit the road, make mistakes, and harm members of the public. Applying agency standards to this emerging problem, this Article develops a legal framework for determining when to hold on-demand firms accountable for the accidents that their contractors cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As law enforcement organizations report challenges surrounding recruitment, evidence-based practices are critical and cost-effective measures which fundamentally support and advance the policing profession. To combat a hiring crisis and remain competitive among endless options of agency vacancies, employers must recognize internal data resources at hand along with the advantages of researcher-practitioner partnerships. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the effectiveness of a single mid-size southeastern municipal law enforcement agency's recruitment program to identify unique indicators present within career decisions from the incoming officer workforce. Primary findings identified the recruitment process to play an integral role in the ultimate application and agency selection decision for participants, regardless of participant background. Further, participant interviews identified elements such as Responsiveness, Communication, Personal, and Timeliness critical to perceived success of the recruitment program. Regarding police staffing, this study introduces a self-sustaining model for agency-specific key motivating factors in recruit agency selection, to include application of strong recruitment practices and benchmark identification for sustained program effectiveness. Implications include the impact of customer-service approaches to police staffing and evidence-based strategies for agency-specific strengths during a nation-wide staffing crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Global Britain' is as much a governing instinct as it is a statement of current policy: an idea that animates the United Kingdom's international relations. And for nine decades the BBC World Service, Britain's principal agent of public diplomacy, has been its exemplar. With a reputation as a trusted source of reliable news in over forty languages, the international BBC sustains a global capacity for intercultural dialogue founded on evidence‐based journalism. At a time when digital media are rewriting the strategic communications playbook and reorganising our knowledge practices and behaviours, the BBC maintains a vital link between Britain and a transnational community of close to half a billion users. Yet, despite these evident strengths, recent confusion over the organisation and funding of the World Service means that its long‐term future is in doubt. This article asks how and why it has come to this and what might be done to preserve the journalistic integrity and 'soft power' of the BBC World Service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Early Pleistocene mammal communities of Europe are characterised by a great diversity of large carnivorans. Among them, the largest ever hyaenid, Pachycrocuta brevirostris, a fierce predator with great bone-cracking adaptations that has left its taphonomic signature on several fossiliferous sites. Here, we perform a rigorous taphonomic analysis focusing on bone surface modifications and damage patterns on large-sized ungulate bones from the site Tsiotra Vryssi (1.78 to ~1.5 Ma; Mygdonia Basin, Greece), aiming to identify the main biotic agent responsible for the modifications. Results reveal significant carnivore ravaging of the assemblage, and selective consumption of bones/bone portions related to nutrient value. Comparisons with modifications on similar-sized ungulate carcasses produced by extant and extinct predators, and similarities with Pachycrocuta-modified assemblages, indicate that Pachycrocuta was the principal agent of modification. Overall, this study not only provides taphonomic evidence for the interpretation of Tsiotra Vryssi, but also offers insights into the palaeobiology, and particularly carcass consumption behaviour of the giant hyaena. Hence, it advances our knowledge on carnivoran guild dynamics and prey– predator relationships during this epoch and has important implications for the investigations of the subsistence behaviour of the meat-eating hominins, who entered Eurasia at ~1.8 Ma, roughly synchronously with Pachycrocuta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of recent authors have argued for the problem of 'democratic dirty hands'. At least within a democracy, public officers can be rightly said to act in the name of the public; and thus, as agents to principals, the dirty hands of public officers are, ultimately attributable to that public. Even more troubling, so the argument goes, since dirty hands are necessary for public officers in any stable political order, then such democratic dirty hands are necessary for any stable democracy. Our dirt is the unavoidable cost of democratic survival. In this paper, I offer an argument against this disconcerting conclusion. My central claim is that proponents of 'democratic dirty hands' have missed the import of another feature of contemporary governance: public institutions. Public institutions, as organisational agents, intermediate the relationship between public officer and public; and in so doing, the dirt necessary for stability may be 'laundered': the public may still gain the benefit of a public officer's hands, but remain clean of the dirt. I illustrate this case by an extended discussion of the case of La Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala ('CICIG'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the work of Annelise Riles, this article invites legal scholars to 'take on the legal technicalities' of globalisation. Law and lawyers have a core role in the conception, the construction and the functioning of global regulatory settings. However, the study of legal technicalities has been overlooked, both by the theoretically-minded literature on law beyond the state and by those studying the actual workings of global governance. We argue that legal technique is too interesting to be reduced to a consequence of wider globalising trends or to a simple instrument of technocratic governance. The study of law as technique can offer insights into how law constitutes social, political or economic phenomena. This kind of self-consciousness and self-reflection is crucial in legal scholarship especially today, as it is a necessary step for opening the way to transformative politics in the field of global governance and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of law in global governance, specifically in the fields of algorithmic governance and finance. It argues that traditional legal categories and techniques have been overshadowed by the development of financialization and automated technologies, allowing private actors to shape new forms of social ordering. The authors emphasize the interplay between legal and technocratic aspects, as well as the global and local dimensions, in the creation of a "law beyond the state." The article also examines the challenges posed by advancements in finance and technology, and the need for legal scholars to adapt their research methods to study new legal objects. It highlights the impact of legal techniques in legitimizing normative solutions and addressing tensions arising from economic and technological developments. The authors discuss the use of analogy as a legal technique in algorithmic governance, revealing how it can erode the foundations of discrimination law and perpetuate social hierarchies. They also examine the role of legal techniques in the field of platform economy, particularly in relation to decentralized finance (DeFi), and question its ability to address socio-economic inequality. The article further explores the interaction between global and local regulatory levels in the law of financial services, emphasizing the political dimension of transnational financial law. It examines the global circulation of the legal technique of securitization and its role in transnational financial transactions. The authors argue that legal techniques and expert knowledge play a crucial role in shaping financial law and facilitating global financial transactions. They also discuss the impact of soft law, such as guidelines and [Extracted from the article]

This article explores what finance can teach us about law's agency in global governance by tracing the global circulation of a specific technique, securitisation, from its origins in mortgage markets to its recent redeployment as a purported tool for ecological transition. It delves into legal practitioners' literature to investigate the various legal problems that had to be addressed, and the various legal solutions that were devised, for securitisation to spread globally. Through the examination of concrete technical problems that securitisation lawyers have had to solve—concerning the constitution of special purpose vehicles, the assignment of receivables, and the construction of new asset classes—I show that what has become globalised in the field of law and finance in the past decades is not primarily a set of transnational norms or authorities, but a repertoire of legal techniques, values, and rhetoric for framing and solving legal problems: a financialised legal knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employees often report being overloaded with routine tasks, which distracts them from more demanding and rewarding work. We analyze this in a multitasking model involving a verifiable routine task and a skill-dependent task characterized by moral hazard. Multitasking is costly so that high- and low-skilled employees specialize, and only employees with intermediate productivity handle both tasks. In the Nash bargaining solution of contract negotiations, work overload in the routine task is used to lower the informational rent from the non-verifiable task. Compared to the first-best solution, more employees perform both tasks and effort in the routine task is inefficiently large. Moreover, the payment structure is such that the employee would prefer to allocate more effort to the demanding task, which we interpret as a loss of control over work autonomy. Reducing employees' bargaining power exacerbates the problem, while the effects of improved monitoring are mixed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chayanov, outside of his theoretical analysis of how peasant households are distinctive for being at once a production and a consumption unit and the multiple implications of that fact, has made two other major theoretical contributions, one making clear that peasant economies observe the logic of "differential optimums" rather than the simple logic of economies of scale and the other having to do with the need for co-operatives for "vertical integration" of small peasant economies in order to preserve for the peasants more of the value of their products in the BIG MARKET. The former can be readily observed in the "new agriculture revolution" of the Chinese economy in the past few decades; the latter can be readily seen in the striking modernization of the "East Asian" (i.e., Japan, South Korea, and the Taiwan area) economies since 1945. China's annual "Number One Documents" about agriculture of the past two decades have shown how the country first mistakenly tried to imitate the simple scale-economy logic of the United States and then shifted since 2018 toward a new emphasis on the peasants as the principal agents of agricultural development and peasant villages as the basic unit for agricultural co-ops. Those have been the basis for new advances as well as for reinterpretations and modifications of Chayanov's two major theoretical visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I study a problem in which the principal is a decision maker and the agent is an "experimenter." Neither the agent nor the principal observes the true state, but the agent can conduct an experiment that reveals information about the true state. The agent has private information about which experiments are feasible, his type. Before the agent conducts an experiment, the principal commits to a decision rule which is contingent on the experiments and their results. When the first-best outcome is unachievable, the principal faces a trade-off between the quality of the experiment and the ex post optimal decisions given experimental results. I characterize two kinds of optimal decision rules: one that sacrifices the ex post optimal decisions for the quality of the experiment, and the other that resolves the trade-off the other way around; which one is optimal depends on the properties of each type's set of feasible experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dirofilariasis is a mosquito-borne disease caused by Dirofilaria parasites, affecting both wild and domestic animals, including humans considered as accidental hosts. Dirofilaria repens is the principal causative agent of dirofilariasis in the Old World, with increasing reports of the parasite in countries where it has not been previously identified, due to several factors such as the expansion of mosquito vectors' geographical distribution. By utilizing newly designed primers for molecular detection and confirming through next-generation sequencing, here, we report the first plausible cases of D. repens in dogs from Colombia. Our results support the classification of this species as an emergent pathogen in the Americas. Finally, we encourage an increase in diagnostic and surveillance efforts to prevent and control the current and future dirofilariasis cases in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proxy warfare, in which one party uses a third party to achieve its own goals, are known for centuries, however, the conceptualization studies of proxy warfare are relatively new. Thereby, in this paper, we assess proxy warfare in terms of agency theory. According to agency theory, the owner of the company delegates their authority to another person (agent) to make decisions on their behalf. If there is information asymmetry between the parties or differentiation in the goals of the principal and the agent or they have different risk-sharing perceptions, agency problem exists. This study discloses that identical problems are common in proxy warfare. That is, if the principal and proxy have unmatching goals or desires accompanying information asymmetry and different risk perceptions, the principal may lose control of the proxy or the principal may exploit the proxy, likewise, the proxy may prefer a different way of action which is not compatible with the goals of the principal. However, this study shows that the remedies for agency theory's "moral hazard" and "adverse selection" problems might be used in proxy warfare problems by establishing outcome-based contracts and a strong knowledge structure between the parties of proxy warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study pinpoints three current factors that could be momentous in a possible transition to marine mining, namely reserve-dependent capital efficiency (accessibility and grade-dependent output per unit capital), cross-sector competition (competition between two separate mining sectors), and asymmetric mineral security considerations (e.g., the resource owner(s) and government(s) tied to a sector desires production for profit and security reasons). Moreover, four conceptual optimization problems are explored to specify the potential roles of said factors in a possible transition. The first problem considers a principal agent, who make decisions on behalf of resource owner(s), government(s) and producer(s), and invests and extracts to maximize the net present value of extraction from onshore and offshore reserves while facing reserve-independent capital efficiency. The second problem considers the same as the first, except here, the principal meets reserve-dependent capital efficiency. The third problem considers two principals, each representing resource owner(s), government(s), and producer(s) tied to a sector, who invest and extract to maximize the net present value of extraction from the respective reserves subject to the decisions of the other principal. Finally, the last problem considers a duopoly setting in which the marine principal values both financial gain and mineral security. The results illustrate that reserve-dependent capital efficiency, cross-sector competition, and mineral security considerations can, in different ways, drive a possible transition to marine mining. Possible counter effective factors are highlighted and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agency theory deals with the interrelationship of a principal and an agent engaged in cooperative behavior. There are also organizational reflections of this relationship between individuals. The aforementioned economic interaction includes theoretical aspects discussed in the context of management science. This aspect of agency theory examines the problems that arise in principal-agent relations and aims to minimize the costs arising from the interaction-based relationship. Diogenes pioneered many forms of behavior that have equivalents within the scope of agency theory and put forward views explaining behavior. The views put forward by Diogenes reveal a wide scope when considered with today's theories. Therefore, in this article, Diogenes's philosophical views on life are discussed in terms of contract costs and limited rationality within the scope of agency theory. In this article, document analysis, which is a qualitative study, was used as a research design. In the article, various transfers, evaluations and interpretations on the Diogenic approach of the concepts of contract costs and bounded rationality, which have a prominent place in agency theory, are presented. As a result, Diogenes used the issues discussed today within the scope of agency theory by illuminating those around him centuries ago and exhibiting them within the framework of vital practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on Textualism being alive and well in Alabama. Topics include helping litigants, attorneys, scholars, and citizens understanding legal interpretation works in this state; and federal government's constitutional obligation for protecting against "domestic violence" requires the national government.

Our article brings to attention the operation of trustee substitution and its complex effects on the relations between all the parties involved, this study being focused more specifically on the relationship between the principal and the substitute agent. Thus, in a previous study, we have analyzed the agent substitution, as a exception from the rule that the trustee must personally carry out the mandate; we focused on the the legal nature of the operation, supporting its "sui generis" character, that differentiates it from the subcontract and the contract assignment; we also analized the effects of the substitution on the relations between the principal and the primary trustee, between the original trustee and substitute, as well as between the contracting parties and third parties. In this article, we shall approach the issue of the direct action that the principal can initiate against the substitute, as well as the intense debates generated in French and Romanian doctrine by the possibility of a jurisprudential recognition of its "bilateralization". French jurisprudence serves as an example of courage and pragmatism on the matter, by consecrating the reciprocity of the direct action, even in the absence of such legal provisions. However, given the fact that Romanian law does not recognize the ability of jurisprudence to establish a direct action, where it is not provided by express law, we highlight the importance of legislative consecration of a direct action of the substitute against the principal, on grounds of equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The JBCC Principal Building Agreement is widely used as the primary building agreement in South Africa, and claims are frequently encountered in construction projects where this contract is implemented. This study, therefore, set out to determine the perspective of principal agents, who are professional consultants acting as contract administrators within the South African construction industry, regarding the magnitude of claim incidents under the JBCC Principal Building Agreement. The research adopted a quantitative approach, involving the completion of a virtual structured questionnaire by 164 respondents who were practising principal agents in South Africa. The collected data was thereafter analysed by means of descriptive statistics. The following claim events were identified as noteworthy in terms of regularity and severity: adverse weather, the execution of additional work, rectification of physical losses and damages to the works where contractors are not at risk, causes beyond the reasonable control of contractors, and the inability to obtain materials and goods in time. By identifying the knowledge void regarding the frequency and impact of claims in South Africa under the JBCC Principal Building Agreement, this study provides contracting parties with updated insights that can assist them in averting and effectively managing such claims, thereby minimising damages to all parties involved. Furthermore, while the study was confined to South Africa, the findings may still hold relevance for users of the contract in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of agency in corporate group from the early days of English company law. It describes three tests for agency that can be identified from English precedents including a parent company's control over its subsidiary, an overseas corporation with a business representative, and a corporation acting directly on the instructions of its members. It examines the current of English law and proposes a test for agency in the corporate context, and general agency principles.

Purpose: This study aims to demonstrate how governmental authorities can take interorganizational network responses to address unexpected situations developed by the breakdown of critical infrastructure, such as communication failure in a hyperconnected society. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses social network analysis to investigate the performance of interorganizational response networks regarding the 2018 KT network blackout, a failure of telecommunication facility, compared to the planned network. Findings: The national fire agency was the most prominent actor in the actual interorganizational network, while the actor was not significant in the planned network in addressing unexpected needs. Moreover, top government authorities were involved in the actual response network because of the national attention on the breakdown of the infrastructure as a focusing event. Originality/value: Unexpected conditions in the actual response to a technological disaster, such as a critical infrastructure (CI) breakdown, require the involvement of emerging or non-significant actors in accordance with the findings related to other types of disasters. Particularly, communication failure in a hyperconnected society may involve prominent government authorities in the actual interorganizational response because of the event's broad and severe impact on the functions of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on interviews with Africans of binational parental heritage to expand the literature on identity formation in two ways. First, it takes on the factors that shape primary identity formation more fully by extending it beyond the current focus on state constrictures on primary identity formation. We argue in this paper that in addition to state constricture, closeness of family ties is yet another factor that shapes the primary identity of individuals with binationality. Individuals claim the identity of that parent whose extended family members have a cordial relationship with them as evident in communication patterns, visits, presence at rites of passage, and the extent to which extended family members embrace them as one of their own. Second, we interrogate the literature on hybridity beyond its focus on types to highlight the instrumental and intrinsic purposes to which hybridity can be put. We show how individuals with a primary identity would choose a secondary identity for instrumental reasons such as the education or work opportunities it provides. The intrinsic value of secondary identity is the entertainment options and sense of self it provides. This piece, focusing on both the factors that shape primary identity as well as when/for what purpose such individuals choose a secondary identity, highlights the agency of such individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the range of problems concerning the level of physical training of future officers of the Border Guard Service of Ukraine. The purpose of the article was to analyze the peculiarities of physical training of border guard cadets before and after the full-scale invasion. Methods: The methods used in the research were both theoretical and practical. The results of the research were processed due to the comparative analysis. Results: The recorded changes were taken into account in the content of the Draft Military Doctrine of Ukraine and in the developed Instructions for the Physical Training of Border Guard Officers; in the work educational programs devoted to physical training, personnel policy of the law enforcement agency and the quality of the relevant training sessions, improving the level of physical training of future border guard officers. Conclusions: The connection between the quality and the content of physical training of future border guard officers in terms of the effectiveness of defensive as well as dynamics and potential of offensive operations during the war was proved subsequent to the results of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An agent and a principal are engaged in an ongoing relationship, where the agent receives project opportunities of random value and is biased towards implementation. Each period, the principal elicits a (non-contractible) recommendation from the agent, compares it to a random outside option and decides whether to implement the project or not. The key distortions in the stationary decision rule used by the principal that will sustain honest reporting by the agent are (i) discrimination against best projects, so that sometimes very good projects are not implemented even if they would benefit the principal, (ii) general favoritism, where proposals other than the best are sometimes implemented even when they have negative value to the principal, and (iii) focused leniency towards average projects, where the bias towards implementation is larger for average projects than for bad or good projects. The first limits the agent's incentives to exaggerate by decreasing the effectiveness of exaggeration, the second increases the overall value of the relationship to the agent while the last targets the projects for which the incentive to exaggerate is the largest to sustain truth-telling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We, first with discrete outcomes and continuous effort, characterize the optimal contracts when a spiteful principal interacts with an other-regarding agent. We show that the optimal wage is weakly decreasing in principal's spitefulness. When the principal and the agent have exactly opposite other-regarding preferences, under certain situations, we get back the self-regarding benchmark optimal contract. Next with continuous outcomes and general functional forms, we characterize the optimal wage schedule and get back the sufficient statistics result when the principal and the agent have exactly opposite other-regarding preferences. • We characterize the optimal contract when a spiteful principal interacts with single agent. • The analysis is conducted both in closed form and in a general structure. • The optimal wage falls (weakly) with a ceteris paribus increase in principal's spite. • Self-regarding benchmark is achieved with exactly opposite other-regarding preferences. • We get back sufficient statistics result with exactly opposite other-regarding preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liquidated damages mechanisms have been analyzed from a legal perspective and applied to real-world contracts. Due to the lack of application of LDs to common agency theory, this research explores whether the liquidated damages mechanism can resolve principal–principal conflicts under common agency. We combine the moral hazard model of common agency with non-cooperative dynamic game theory to analyze the influence of the liquidated damages mechanism on the agent and principals under the condition of complete information and incomplete information. We find that liquidated damages are the key factors affecting the optimal contract between the principal and agent. Since the agent does not terminate the current contract, a principal–principal conflict arises when another principal wishes to enter into a new contract with the common agent. We find that the agent terminates the existing contract and signs a new one with another principal. The injured party requires liquidated damages from the breaching party. Therefore, they will negotiate the number of liquidated damages. Liquidated damages cause the bargaining game to generate a unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium and sequential equilibrium. We prove that only when liquidated damages belong to a specific interval does a mechanism generating the Pareto optimal solutions to solve the principal–principal conflicts under common agency exist. A common way to resolve this conflict is ensuring that the minority is subordinate to the majority. For the first time, we study how the liquidated damages mechanism solves multi-principal conflict. This is another perspective that can be used to solve the conflict. Therefore, our paper expands the method of resolving the conflict and extends the theory of common agency; we first show the delegation process. Our research can be applied to various situations and provide a rational decision-making basis for participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study aims to bring to attention a type of contract of major importance in the field of legal relations, namely the mandate, focusing on the issue of trustee substitution, with all the consequences that derive from such an operation. Thus, in the first part of the article, we shall analyze the obligation of the trustee to personally carry out the mandate and, as a derogation from this rule, the possibility of the agent to substitute another person. We shall discuss the legal nature of this operation, differentiating it from the subcontract and the assignment of contract. Then we shall review the effects it generates on the relations between the principal and the primary trustee, between the original trustee and substitute, as well as between the contracting parties and third parties, both in the case of authorized and unauthorized substitution. We shall address the multiple facets of the relationship between the principal and the substitute agent in the second part of this article, as it has caused numerous debates, mainly related to the possibility of initiating a direct action between the parties at the "extremes" of the substitution operation, and its unilateral or reciprocal character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present a typically African account of human dignity, which I derive from Ifeanyi Menkiti’s influential strongly normative view of traditional African practices of recognition respect (2004). I explain how this implies a suitable basis for a common good criterion for human rights. I develop this account against (a) the claims of Tshepo Madlingozi (2017) and Vincent Lloyd that the struggle against anti-Black racist domination does not depend on recognition; (b) the claim by David Boucher (2011) that human dignity is a convenient fiction for human rights recognition; and (c) the claims of Kwame Gyekye (2002) and Motsamai Molefe (2020) that Menkiti’s view on human dignity does not provide adequate warrant for the universality of human rights. I draw on Menkiti’s account of recognition respect for human dignity and on arguments for the authority of actual rights recognition by Gerald Gaus (2006) and Rex Martin (2013). In doing so, I present a comprehensive theory of human rights recognition that does not depend on any intrinsic, transcendental human capacity but locates the universality of human rights in the mutually recognised common good, which is implicit in extant African communal normative social practices that are oriented toward the recognition of dignity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The model of innovation mechanism of university scientific research team under continuous optimization path is constructed by using quantum game theory, and two cases of unentangled and entangled states are compared. Then, the main factors affecting the model are discussed. In order to optimize the model and promote coordination and balance between the principal and the agent, the positive strategies and empirical test are provided. Interestingly, the multi-soliton phenomena in innovation mechanism are observed; the soliton in this model may have other implications in physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on practical training to law students and providing legal services to low income older adults. Topics include supervising representation of clients, students advancing the understanding of the professional identity; and requiring the supervising attorney for taking personal responsibility for the supervision and guidance of the student.

Kaposi's sarcoma is a multifocal angiogenic tumor disease whose principal causal agent is human herpes virus 8 (HHV-8). Herein, we report a rare case of iatrogenic Kaposi's sarcoma developing during oral corticotherapy. A 76-year-old, HIV-negative male presented with papulous, angiomatous lesions on the trunk and limbs, which appeared three months after the beginning of oral corticotherapy for bullous pemphigoid. We suspected iatrogenic Kaposi's sarcoma given the time to lesion onset in relation to the immunosuppressive treatment, together with histological and virological confirmation of HHV-8. The lesions began to subside when corticosteroids were tapered down to 10 mg/day. This was the first case reported in our setting and it emphasized the need for the rigorous monitoring of patients receiving immunosuppressants to avoid overlooking the side effects or rare complications of these treatments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International non‐majoritarian institutions (NMIs) in finance have proliferated over the last decades. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) is the main international NMI in finance and the European Union (EU) is one of its core jurisdictions. Despite the far‐reaching effects of international banking standards in the EU, especially the Basel accords, there has been limited politicization of delegation to the BCBS and no attempt to reverse it. Why? By taking a "soft" principal‐agent approach, this paper points out two explanatory factors: the composite nature of both the principal and the agent. It also identifies a pattern that can be generalized to other international NMIs in finance. Thus, following the initial delegation of international standard‐setting to the BCBS, this international NMI considerably increased its activities, going beyond what certain elected officials wanted; the response from elected officials was limited to the use of relatively weak ex‐ante and ex‐post controls, including delayed compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutivism holds that an account of what a thing is yields those normative standards to which that thing is by nature subject. We articulate a minimal form of constitutivism that we call formal, non-epistemological constitutivism which diverges from orthodox versions of constitutivism in two main respects. First: whereas orthodox versions of constitutivism hold that those ethical norms to which people are by nature subject are sui generis because of their special capacity to motivate action and legitimate criticism, we argue that these features are compatible with treating these norms as of a piece with those 'formal' natural-historical norms which can be used to assess living things. Second: unlike orthodox versions of constitutivism, our version does not seek to use a non-normative account of that kind of being which we are as a means of identifying those normative claims to which we are are by nature subject. We then indicate how our position can afford us the resources to address some of the familiar difficulties that face cognitivism in ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]