infonet-economy

The ABO project aims in the design and development an agent platform where mobile agents represent business processes. These agents encapsulate the policies, business practices and models of different business activities (like order management, payroll, warehouse and stock control). The aim of ABO is to provide a new paradigm of Business Information System design and use.

The authors investigate the impact of direct democracy on aspects of the political process in Switzerland. They dwell in particular on the concrete use of the instruments of direct democracy by organized groups of citizens, and on the effects of this use on collective protest movements (or social movements) at the local level. The essay divides into three parts. The first briefly...

Explanations of protest policing have neglected the "spotlight of the media." Based on data on repression and its media coverage in four Swiss cities from 1965 to 1994, our findings suggest that the mass media do have an impact on levels and forms of repression, along with political opportunity dimensions and levels of disruption. We identify two mechanisms. First, we show...

We show how a collection of results in the literature on the empirical estimation of welfare indicators from sample data can be unified. We also demonstrate how some of these ideas can be extended to empirically important cases where the data have been trimmed or censored.

In this paper we discuss the institutional setting, both cultural and political, for the claim-making of immigrants and ethnic minorities and derive a number of hypotheses regarding variations in the extent, forms, and content of claim-making. The general underlying idea is that the political-institutional setting shapes the modalities of claim-making, while the cultural-...