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Background: The global COVID-19 pandemic turned the adoption of on-line assessment in the institutions for higher education from possibility to necessity. Thus, in the end of Fall 20/21 semester Tel Aviv University (TAU)--the largest university in Israel--designed and implemented a scalable procedure for administering proctored remote examinations. This procedure is applicable to different kinds of examinations in diverse disciplines and to disparate degree levels. Objectives: This study aims to deepen the knowledge with respect to the design and adoption of remote proctoring at an institutional level Methods: First, based on lessons learned from the first semester of COVID-19, we describe the development and implementation of an institution-wide protocol for conducting on-line proctored assessment. We show the large-scale applicability of the protocol for administering examinations via Moodle with remote proctoring via Zoom. The accurately designed procedures that included careful consideration of all parties involved--academic staff members, students, administrative staff and proctors--enabled TAU to successfully assess the learning outcomes of its 25,000 students, while maintaining validity, compatibility and reliability of the assessment. Second, we report combined data from surveys of 4380 students and 188 faculty-members (18% and 12% response rate respectively), conducted at TAU following these examinations. Results and Conclusions: With over 90% of the students experiencing at least one, and 80% of faculty-members administering at least one proctored remote examination, these heterogeneous sources of data allow us to investigate a unique and complementary perspective of the process. Some of the significant findings consist of the over-all perception of the students' integrity by both groups surveyed; the discrepancy in the groups' perspectives of the adequate form of learning-assessment--with the instructors preferring proctored examinations and the students--formative-assessment; and the influence of the pedagogical challenges on the perception of validity that outweighed other factors, for example, the pandemic-related stress, the on-line assessment challenges and other.

In the absence of antitrust regulations, rational profit-maximizing firms in an oligopoly may freely act in consort to reach a consensus and to maintain prices above the competitive level. However, in light of potential exposure to antitrust investigations and prospective heavy sanctions, firms attempt to achieve collusive outcomes without resorting to explicit agreements. One mechanism that may promote such tacit collusion is information-sharing; that is, the otherwise competing firms exchange their private information in order to set and maintain supra-competitive prices. Thus far, the attention of the antitrust authorities and scholars has focused on the phenomenon of horizontal information-sharing, i.e., the exchange of information between rival firms that operate at the same economic level. Contrary to this body of work, this article focuses on the effect of vertical information-sharing on the ability of the firms to collude. Recently, it has been shown that when competing retailers disclose their private information to a mutual manufacturer, the wholesale price set by the latter provides a signal to the retailers. This signal allows the retailers to fix prices without the necessity of any direct communication between them, thereby achieving a collusive outcome while avoiding the risk of being exposed to the scrutiny of the antitrust authorities. Another fascinating aspect of the collusion achieved through vertical information-exchange is that it can generate social costs higher than those of direct collusion. In other words, from the social welfare perspective, in certain instances--such as those discussed in this article--the social planner would be better off allowing competing firms to collude directly, rather than exchanging their private information via their mutual manufacturer. Therefore, understanding the neglected impact of vertical information-sharing is important not only for effective antitrust laws, but also for developing effective policies and regulations. Calling into focus the strategic behavior of competing retailers that may produce outcomes similar--or even severer--than those resulting from collusive agreement based on horizontal information-sharing, this article is the first attempt to address the legal implications of such a scheme, while integrating the findings of the economic literature. In particular, this article argues that: (1) antitrust authorities should broaden the scope of their scrutiny to include vertical information-sharing; and (2) case law permits such information-sharing to be condemned under the Sherman Act if it produces anticompetitive effects without counterbalancing procompetitive effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change of legal-cultural attitudes has not received particular attention. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with the immigrants of the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union to Israel and the secular Israeli Jews, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the various aspects of legal culture of these groups. The second important finding is the persistence of the legal-cultural attitudes and perceptions over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much legal research has examined the problem of court delays and backlogs, the link between the prosecutor's incentives to press charges and the subsequent effect on congestion in the criminal justice system has remained largely overlooked. To understand the implications of such decisions for court congestion, we model prosecutor incentives using queuing theory. We demonstrate that a benevolent decision-maker weighs the trade-off between the desire to increase the volume of cases reaching the court in order to convict the guilty and the delay costs that are due to the length of court proceedings. Using two prosecutorial incentive schemes that have previously been identified in the literature-the conviction rate and the total number of convictions-we find that a prosecutor who is acting to increase his own utility would deviate from charging the socially-desired number of cases. Following these negative results, we design a mechanism that induces the prosecutor to press charges in the socially-optimal number of cases. Also new in this paper is the methodology of using queuing theory in conjunction with issues of court delay and prosecution incentives. While thus far this tool has been widely applied in other disciplines of economics research, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize this method in issues related to court congestion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]