Towards secure quadratic voting

We provide an overview of some of the security issues involved in securely implementing Lalley and Weyl’s “Quadratic Voting” (Lalley and Weyl, Quadratic voting, 2016), and suggest some possible implementation architectures. Our proposals blend end-to-end verifiable voting methods with anonymous payments. We also consider new refund rules for quadratic voting, such as a “lottery” method.     

Making the Most of the First‐Offer Advantage: Pre‐Offer Conversation and Negotiation Outcomes

Why do some negotiators benefit from making the first offer during negotiations while others do not? This study explores the contents of conversations that take place before negotiators make their first offers in order to learn more about the differences between ultimately successful first offers that benefit from anchoring effects and ultimately unsuccessful ones in which negotiators apparently derive no benefit from making the first offer. In‐depth qualitative analyses of the conversations that role players engaged in prior to their first offers were conducted in simulated negotiation exercises. Their analysis identified five different conversational tactics that negotiators employed in one‐on‐one negotiations to gain power in the negotiation, or what they call here “power conversation tactics.” Their findings suggest that the negotiation outcome (i.e., net value) was related to how the negotiators employed and combined these tactics during the pre‐offer conversation. Based on these findings, they conceptualized four types of power‐gaining/power‐losing pre‐offer conversation scenarios and explored the link between negotiation outcomes and each of these types of pre‐offer conversations. This study further develops the literature on power dynamics and conversations in negotiations as well as the literature on the anchoring effect of a first offer.     

A Local History of Vietnamese Sinology in Early Twentieth Century Annam—the Case of the Bulletin Du học báo 遊學報

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Sinology was known in Vietnam as “Hán h?c 漢學” (or occasionally as “Trung h?c 中學”), and due to the country’s long history of Confucian civil service examination, “Hán h?c”/“Trung h?c” was identified with Confucianism and Confucian learning. In order to avoid any grand narrative that overlooks the multifacetedness of reality, writing about the history of Vietnamese Sinology should start with “local narrative,” trying to answer a series of “WH-questions” to form a small piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Following this direction, the present paper focuses on the promotion of Confucian ethics in early twentieth century Vietnam through the case of a bulletin called Du h?c báo 遊學報 published under the sponsorship of the Nguy?n court in the protectorate Annam. In order to modernize their “half colonial, half feudal” kingdom technologically without touching the foundation of their political system, the Nguy?n court employed the bulletin as a forum to promote Confucian values interpreted accordingly to Western philosophy and ethics to keep their young elites away from socialist/communist influence during their overseas study.