​It was hoped that by paying forest dependent peoples and countries for their “service” of conserving their forests, REDD+ would lead to a reduction in deforestation greenhouse gases. The complexities have, however, left some ambiguities. It was never agreed who would pay for the program, and it has been criticized as ignoring the root causes of forest loss. Considering the motivations of those who promoted REDD+ this book proposes remedies to its shortfalls and recommends more efficient, equitable and effective conservation policies.

This book is a continuation of Corporate Law and the Theory of the Firm: Reconstructing Corporations, Shareholders, Directors, Owners, and Investors. The author extends his analysis of contract law, property law, agency law, trust law, and corporate statutory law and applies that analysis to defy conventional concepts and theories in economics, finance, investment, and accounting and expose the artificial boundaries established by decades of research founded on indefensible assumptions and fallacious conclusions. Using the Humpty Dumpty principle, where words mean what the authors want them to mean, economists have created "strange new worlds" where contract law, property law, agency law, and corporate statutory law no longer apply. The author dismantles the theory of the firm by proving the theory of the firm wilfully and intentionally ignores fundamental contract law, property law, agency law, and corporate statutory law. Contrary to the theory of the firm, shareholders do not own corporations, directors are not agents of shareholders, and shareholders are not investors in corporations. The author proves that by property law and corporate law, capital is not privately owned by capitalists but by corporations. Entire economic and social systems have been constructed that have no basis in law. With the advent of publicly traded corporations, the capital is there, but both capitalists and capitalism have been rendered extinct. This book will appeal to researchers and graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in economics, finance, accounting, law, and sociology, as well as legal scholars, attorneys and accountants.

The concept of innovation is not new. It relates closely to the concept of change. Both are inevitable in today’s and tomorrow’s business environments. Standing still and hoping for the best is no longer a viable option. Innovation, by itself, is not a panacea for positive accomplishments. Of paramount importance to any business is how successful any innovation has actually been. This book brings together the knowledge, learning and experience from the author's practical applications of a newly developed and implemented Innovation Scorecard methodology to close exactly this shortfall. Their ‘one stop shop’ methodology is a complete end to end approach on how to measure the success of any innovation, irrespective of whether this relates to projects or business as usual work environments. This landmark methodology will provide the reader with an applied proof of concept across a range of business applications and a complete end to end process how to measure success including templates and worked examples. The book offers a starter-pack with suggested performance metrics to get the reader on the road to measuring the success of innovation and to encourage readers to develop how they view and feel about measuring the success of innovation. Furthermore, the book provides the reader with everything they need to know, ranging from a simple to follow user-friendly process to the application of suggested performance metrics and how to apply these in any business work environment, which is a requisite for creating a working environment within the reader’s organisation where innovation and forward-thinking are both encouraged and supported.

Distributed Computing by Mobile Entities is concerned with the study of the computational and complexity issues arising in systems of decentralized computational entities operating in a spatial universe Encompassing and modeling a large variety of application environments and systems, from robotic swarms to networks of mobile sensors, from software mobile agents in communication networks to crawlers and viruses on the web, the theoretical research in this area intersects distributed computing with the fields of computational geometry (especially for continuous spaces), control theory, graph theory and combinatorics (especially for discrete spaces). The research focus is on determining what tasks can be performed by the entities, under what conditions, and at what cost. In particular, the central question is to determine what minimal hypotheses allow a given problem to be solved. This book is based on the lectures and tutorial presented at the research meeting on “Moving and Computing" (mac) held at La Maddalena Island in June 2017. Greatly expanded, revised and updated, each of the lectures forms an individual Chapter. Together, they provide a map of the current knowledge about the boundaries of distributed computing by mobile entities.

This volume deals with important historical aspects of the `Associated Press', the largest news agency in the world with bureaus in more than 100 countries. The book concentrates on those Pulitzer Prizes earned by AP journalists for topics of some kind of international or foreign relevance, either for texts or pictures, covering the period from 1938 - 2020.

Can we rely on the altruism of professionals or the public service ethos to deliver good quality health and education services? And how should patients, parents, and pupils behave - as grateful recipients or active consumers? This book provides new answers to these questions - a milestone in the analysis and development of public policy, from one of the leading thinkers in the field. It provides a new perspective on policy design, emphasising the importance of analysing the motivation of professionals and others who work within the public sector, and both their and public service beneficiaries' capacity for agency or independent action. It argues that the conventional assumption that public sector professionals are public-spirited altruists or 'knights' is misplaced; but so is the alternative that they are all, in David Hume's terminology, 'knaves' or self-interested egoists. We also must not assume that individual citizens are passive recipients of public services (pawns); but nor can they be untrammelled sovereigns with unrestricted choices over services and resources (queens). Instead, policies must be designed so as to give the proper balance of motivation and agency. The book illustrates how this can be done by detailed empirical examination of recent policies in health services, education, social security and taxation. It puts forwards proposals for policy reform, several of which either originated with the author or with which he has been closely associated: universal capital or 'demogrants', discriminating vouchers, matching grants for pensions and for long-term care, and hypothecated taxes.

This volume represents an advanced, comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of the field of rational agency as it stands today. It covers the philosophical foundations of rational agency, logical and decision-theoretic approaches to rational agency, multi-agent aspects of rational agency and a number of approaches to programming rational agents. It will be of interest to researchers in logic, mainstream computer science, the philosophy of rational action and agency, and economics.

Traditionally, the notion of defeat has been central to epistemology, practical reasoning, and ethics. Within epistemology, it is standardly assumed that a subject who knows that p, or justifiably believes that p, can lose this knowledge or justified belief by acquiring a so-called 'defeater', whether that is evidence that not-p, evidence that the process that produced her belief is unreliable, or evidence that she has likely misevaluated her own evidence. Within ethics and practical reasoning, it is widely accepted that a subject may initially have a reason to do something although this reason is later defeated by her acquisition of further information. However, the traditional conception of defeat has recently come under attack. Some have argued that the notion of defeat is problematically motivated; others that defeat is hard to accommodate within externalist or naturalistic accounts of knowledge or justification; and still others that the intuitions that support defeat can be explained in other ways. This volume presents new work re-examining the very notion of defeat, and its place in epistemology and in normativity theory at large.