Alternating offer games and private rulings of the Australian Tax Office

The concept of submitting oneself to a voluntary negotiation is by no means new to big business. Formal bargaining has been quite successful over the years in providing the venue for agents to explore a more logical and mathematical approach to bargaining. However in more recent times external influences have been applied to agents who provide better deals for favored executives. This external influence has displayed itself in taxtion negotiations to the extent that tax office agents have been dismissed for irresponsible conduct. We explore this specific type of negotiation using an alternating offer bargaining game to model the particular influences, which create unfair rulings in negotiations. By the constraints of this systematic mathematical approach to negotiation, we will explore the advantages of a more formal game theoretic approach. In this presentation we will also elaborate on finding Nash Equilibrium in alternating offer games.

Da fantasia à realidade, da realidade à fantasia: aspectos culturais, históricos e mercadológicos das campanhas publicitárias de games

A pesquisa tem como objetivo geral compreender como as empresas fabricantes de consoles de videogames da última geração (Sony, Microsoft e Nintendo) utilizam a publicidade para atingir os consumidores. O corpus de análise e interpretação delimita-se em oito peças publicitárias audiovisuais e o período de análise é de 2010 a 2011. As estratégicas metodológicas utilizadas são: quanto aos dados de pesquisa, o estudo é essencialmente qualitativo; em relação aos objetivos, a pesquisa é exploratória; quanto às fontes para obtenção de dados, a pesquisa é bibliográfica e empírica, sendo a fase empírica dividida em observação não-participante, descrição dos anúncios de games e análise de conteúdo audiovisual. Após as análises, demonstrou-se que, apesar de os games estarem na vida cotidiana e serem sonho de consumo de muitas pessoas, sua divulgação ainda é restrita a um número limitado de jogadores. Observa-se que, nas campanhas analisadas como um conjunto, há uma preocupação maior com o público adulto, o que não ocorria há cinco anos, na geração anterior de consoles. Apesar disso, os consoles ainda não são enxergados com todas as suas potencialidades tecnológicas e culturais.

Olympic games, mega-events, and civil societies:globalisation, environment, resistance

This volume explores sports mega-events, their social, political, and cultural characters, the value systems that they inscribe and draw on, the claims they make on us and the claims the organisers make for them, the spatial and ethical relationships they create, and the responses of civil societies to them. Our premise is that sports mega-events are not simply sporting or cultural phenomena. They are also political and economic events, characterised by the generation and projection of symbolic meanings – most obviously over the nature of statehood, economic power, and of collective cultural identity – and by social conflict, especially over land use, and over the extent and contours of public spending commitments. Because of their peculiar spatial and temporal organization, they raise questions about the relationships between global cultural and economic flows and particular local and national spaces. Because of their evolutionary characteristics, they ask us to consider not simply the time of the event but of the effects of the event on the long-term direction, implementation, and consequences of public policy.