We study the fair allocation of m indivisible items to n agents with additive utilities. In our setting, each indivisible item may be a good, yielding non-negative utility to some agents, or a chore, yielding negative utility to others. Whilst envy-free allocations may not exist in the indivisible-items setting, envy-freeness can be achieved if some amount of divisible good (i.e., money) is introduced. When each item's utility or disutility is bounded by one, we show that a subsidy of at most one dollar per agent suffices to guarantee the existence of an envy-free allocation, and that this bound is tight. Moreover, such an allocation can be computed in polynomial time. Since at least one agent need not receive any subsidy, our results imply that a total subsidy of at most n-1 dollars suffices to ensure envy-freeness.

We study the fundamental problem of fairly dividing indivisible items among agents with additive utilities. In our model, an item can be a good yielding non-negative utilities to some agents and simultaneously a chore yielding negative utilities to others. We take the best-of-both-worlds perspective and our goal is to construct a randomized allocation that is exactly fair ex ante while also being supported on ex post approximately fair allocations. The fairness notions examined in this paper are envy-freeness (EF) and its well-known relaxation envy-freeness up to one item (EF1). Our main result is that ex-ante EF and ex-post EF1 can be achieved simultaneously. To achieve this, we introduce a novel probabilistic Hall-type matrix decomposition that intricately correlates the fractional assignments of goods and chores. We resolve this decomposition problem by combining continuous minimax duality – via Sion's minimax theorem – with carefully designed biased flow networks.

We give faster exponential-time randomised approximation algorithms for counting problems where polynomial-time approximation is unavailable and exact exponential-time counting remains expensive. For general n-vertex graphs, our independent-set counter runs in O^∗(1.1869^n) time, improving the previous O^∗(1.2041^n) general-graph bound. For n-variable #2-SAT, we obtain an O^∗(1.2373^n)-time approximation algorithm, narrowly below Wahlström's currently cited O^∗(1.2377^n) variable-parameter exact bound. The new algorithmic point is to take the square root after decomposition. For a single bounded unweighted self-reduction with f(x) positive leaves and recursion-compatible upper bound b(x), an enumerate-or-sample estimator gives an (ε,δ)-approximation in O^∗(√(b(x)) ε^-2log1δ) time. After preprocessing decomposes an input into many bounded cores, the combined estimator pays O^∗(√(∑_i b_i(x_i)) ε^-2log1δ), rather than estimating the cores separately at cost ∑_i √(b_i(x_i)). The same conversion improves the bases for counting maximal cliques, minimal separators, and perfect matchings in subcubic graphs. Bounded unweighted self-reductions provide the formal language; at the level of counting classes, the resulting unweighted formulation has the same Karp closure as TotP. With explicit recursion-tree access, the framework yields black-box quantum speed-ups.

We study the strategyproof placement of k facilities on the real line for n agents who privately report their locations, without monetary transfers. For two facilities, the Proportional Mechanism of Lu, Sun, Wang, and Zhu (2010) is strategyproof in expectation and achieves a constant-factor approximation to the optimal social cost. Whether such a guarantee is possible for three facilities in the standard model, where each agent is served by her nearest open facility, has remained open. We resolve this question affirmatively by introducing the Random-Anchor Volume mechanism. The mechanism first opens a facility at the report of a uniformly random agent, called the anchor, and then jointly selects two additional reports, assigning each pair probability proportional to the product of the two consecutive gaps formed by the pair and the anchor. We prove that the mechanism is strategyproof in expectation and has expected social cost at most 8 OPT_3, where OPT_k denotes the minimum social cost achievable using at most k facilities. The mechanism naturally extends to every k≥ 2 by selecting k-1 additional reports with probability proportional to the product of the consecutive gaps among them and the anchor. Under truthful reporting, this generalization has expected social cost at most 4(k-1)OPT_k. Its incentive guarantee, however, has a sharp boundary: the mechanism is strategyproof in expectation for k∈{1,2,3}, but is manipulable for every k≥ 4.

Abstract This article explores the role of sacred fossils, specifically ammonites called “Shaligrams,” in criminal acts and norm violations. It challenges conventional theories of criminal motivation via object agency, where nonhuman entities significantly impact crime conceptualization and perpetration. Originating from Nepal, Shaligrams are revered as living manifestations of Hindu gods and possess unique agency that influences human behavior. The relationships that humans form with Shaligrams blur the lines between rational human choice and response to the needs and desires of “agentic” objects. By examining instances where Shaligrams inspire criminal actions or where they themselves violate norms, we broaden the understanding of criminal agency beyond human-centric perspectives. Inclusion of Shaligrams in criminal networks and their impact on decision-making highlights the interplay between humans, natural objects, and cultural beliefs. This anthropological approach to criminology offers new insights into the dynamics of crime, challenging traditional notions of agency and rationality in criminal acts.

We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible items and a desirable heterogeneous divisible good (i.e., cake) to agents with additive utilities. In our paper, each indivisible item can be a good that yields non-negative utilities to some agents and a chore that yields negative utilities to the other agents. Given a fixed set of divisible and indivisible resources, we investigate almost envy-free allocations, captured by the natural fairness concept of envy-freeness for mixed resources (EFM). It requires that an agent $i$ does not envy another agent $j$ if agent $j$'s bundle contains any piece of cake yielding positive utility to agent $i$ (i.e., envy-freeness), and agent $i$ is envy-free up to one item (EF1) towards agent $j$ otherwise. We prove that with indivisible items and a cake, an EFM allocation always exists for any number of agents with additive utilities.

We prove that computing the deterministic communication complexity of a Boolean function, given its truth table, is -complete in the standard protocol-tree-depth model, addressing a meta-complexity question raised by Yao in 1979. The reduction is from {0,1}-Vector Bin Packing and produces, in polynomial time, a communication matrix whose optimal protocol depth exhibits a one-bit gap between satisfiable and unsatisfiable instances. The main technical contribution is the relaxed-interlacing framework that makes this reduction possible. It replaces exponential-size Cartesian products with polynomial-size almost t-wise independent column sets, a pseudorandom substitute for full products, while preserving the lower-bound and protocol-control statements needed for the reduction. We develop these statements in two stages: first for classical interlacing, where projection arguments give clean lower bounds and separation statements, and then for relaxed interlacing, where a bridge lemma recovers the classical lower-bound and separation statements with controlled density loss. This leads to an extension theorem that lifts the classical lower bound to the relaxed setting and a near-exact separation theorem that lifts the corresponding protocol-control statement, with the present -completeness theorem as their main application here.

This work introduces two techniques for the design and analysis of branching algorithms, illustrated through the case study of the Vertex Cover problem. First, we present a method for automatically generating branching rules through a systematic case analysis of local structures. Second, we develop a new technique for analyzing randomized branching algorithms using the Measure Conquer method, offering greater flexibility in formulating branching rules. By combining these innovations with additional techniques, we obtain the fastest known randomized algorithms in different parameters for the Vertex Cover problem on graphs with bounded degree (up to 6) and on general graphs. For example, our algorithm solves Vertex Cover on subcubic graphs in O^*(1.07625^n) time and O^*(1.13132^k) time, respectively. For graphs with maximum degree 4, we achieve running times of O^*(1.13735^n) and O^*(1.21103^k), while for general graphs we achieve O^*(1.25281^k).

This article contributes to the debate on illicit antiquities and deterrence. First, I briefly examine what has been written about deterrence in the literature on illicit antiquities. Second, I review the criminological research literature on deterrence to define the concept and explain its mechanics; that is, how, according to the best state of current knowledge, deterrence “works” to persuade people not to commit crime. Third, I consider what this criminological knowledge base means for deterrence in the field of illicit antiquities. Deterrence remains a developing idea, rich with practical implications for crime prevention but also harboring some profound unresolved questions about precisely what drives human action in certain contexts. Nonetheless, we can aim to gain a more rounded understanding of the concept than has previously been applied to illicit antiquities studies.

Purpose This paper reviews the recent collapse of two cryptocurrency enterprises, FTX and Celsius. These two cases of institutional bankruptcy have generated criminal charges and other civil complaints, mainly alleging fraud against the CEOs of the companies. This paper aims to analyse the fraud leading to these bankruptcies, drawing on key concepts from the research literature on economic crime to provide explanations for what happened. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a case study approach to the question of how large financial institutions can go off the rails. Two theoretical perspectives are applied to the cases of the FTX and Celsius collapses. These are the “normalisation of deviance” theory and the “cult of personality”. Findings In these two case studies, there is an interaction between the “normalisation of deviance” on the institutional level and the “cult of personality” at the level of individual leadership. The CEOs of the two companies promoted themselves as eccentric but successful examples of the visionary tech finance genius. This fostered the normalisation of deviance within their organisations. Employees, investors and regulators allowed criminal and highly financially risky practices to become normalised as they were caught up in the attractive story of the trailblazing entrepreneur making millions in the new cryptoeconomy. Originality/value This paper makes a contribution both to the case study literature on economic crime and to the development of general theory in economic criminology.

The study of crime and criminality in the art market has received increasing attention within criminology, however little has been written on the criminogenic values built into the structure of the art market. Despite increasing legislation to counteract instances of money laundering and fraud, the legal governance of the art market brings such ambiguity that actors in the market have formed their own responses to managing risk. In this article, we discuss how these actors rely on security bubbles and self-regulation and how this can have the unfortunate effect of adding to a criminogenic art market where white-collar crime is sustained. The dependence on self-policing created a field where powerful elites run things, and traditional policing agents have little purchase.

The extraordinary current craze around NFTs reflects their perceived value as a technological development that can bring greater certainty to questions of ownership and authenticity in fields like art and other collectibles. This is, among other things, the promise of crime prevention through technology, as ownership and authenticity are in the art world closely tied to criminal legal matters like theft, handling stolen goods and fraud. The crime prevention promise looks to fall flat though, as the technology seems to be less capable of delivering these benefits than has been assumed by its promoters. Much of the attraction of NFTs is therefore not actually based on effective crime prevention, but rather on hype. This paper explores the hype, and its relationship to the crime prevention promise of NFTs, through the lens of ‘the social lives of things’. We argue that as well as social lives, things have criminal lives. Analysis sensitive to the criminal lives of things finds an NFT trading scene heated by emotion: excitement, attraction, temptation, speculative euphoria and acquisitive, possessive sentiment. This creates a sense of object agency more active than the cold traditional vision of material structure presented in standard criminological treatments of things-in-the-world as passive opportunity structures. The hyped NFT market trades in affecting objects that create crime in emotional as well as structural ways. We therefore arrive at a conclusion opposite to starting assumptions: far from preventing crime, NFTs are making it.

Fifty years after the adoption of the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the illicit trade in cultural objects endures, with harmful consequences to local communities, knowledge acquisition, and archaeological landscapes and objects. In this article, we present a gap analysis to assess under-performing policy and practice. We argue that a poor understanding of how the trade is organized and operates and of how it might be regulated hinders effective policy formulation. Funding structures which encourage short-term ad hoc research and inhibit information sharing are in part responsible for some of the gaps. We conclude by suggesting how sustained theoretically informed, evidence-led collaborative analyses might help reduce or mitigate these problems, preventing another 50 years of illicit trade.

Online markets in cryptocurrency represent a sprawling and eclectic alternative financial system, selling cutting edge techno-investment schemes that are complex and high risk. Crime control is almost entirely absent from this new crypto economy, and it is full of scams. This paper draws on an ethnography of crypto trading to review the main types of scam, suggesting that the grey economy of cryptocurrency trading is part of a wider evolution of society towards the technosocial, and beyond that perhaps towards the metaversal.

Over recent decades Intelligence-led Policing (ILP) has become a central component of the attempts by New Zealand Police (NZP) to engineer a transformative shift away from ‘reactive’ policing to more ‘proactive’ approaches to crime reduction. ILP appeared to offer an effective response to increasingly complex crime problems, an expanded ‘mission’ and growing public demand, by placing crime intelligence central to decision making. As part of an international study exploring police intelligence, we conducted 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Police Intelligence staff at all levels of the police hierarchy. Our findings highlight five critical barriers to implementing a successful ILP project in New Zealand. We suggest ILP has not delivered its promised effect of catalysing a major reorientation of the modes of frontline policing or its delivery and argue that this is due to the structural resilience of traditional police cultural reluctance to allow long-established practice and procedural norms to be fundamentally changed.

We study liquid democracy, a collective decision making paradigm that allows voters to transitively delegate their votes, through an algorithmic lens. In our model, there are two alternatives, one correct and one incorrect, and we are interested in the probability that the majority opinion is correct. Our main question is whether there exist delegation mechanisms that are guaranteed to outperform direct voting, in the sense of being always at least as likely, and sometimes more likely, to make a correct decision. Even though we assume that voters can only delegate their votes to better-informed voters, we show that local delegation mechanisms, which only take the local neighborhood of each voter as input (and, arguably, capture the spirit of liquid democracy), cannot provide the foregoing guarantee. By contrast, we design a nonlocal delegation mechanism that does provably outperform direct voting under mild assumptions about voters.

In this chapter we propose the idea of a 'desirescape', where a spatial array of myriad agentic objects cultivates desire among people to collect, own, possess, and show off artworks. Within this desirescape, people are conceived of as caught in a web of objects that not only generate and manipulate desire, but also disturb reason. Moving away from a human-oriented sociology of art worlds, we explore the object networks of art within market spaces (dealerships, museums, art fairs, auctions) to consider how actor-objects active create a network into which human-subjects are drawn. We then consider how these object-networks might lead to the violation of ethical or social norms or the committing of a crime. While we ultimately advocate for an expansion of object-focused criminological theory, this work has immediate practical implications. Criminologists may benefit from thinking about crime prevention priorities in terms of changing the network properties of these webs of alluring objects, rather than focussing on the more traditional technique of dissuading individuals from committing crime through responding to these allures.

In this chapter, we fi rst argue for a green criminological perspective on culture as well as nature, as those concepts are framed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Second, from within this green crimino-logical perspective we discern a neocolonial hegemony in the resource extraction from developing countries that is represented by international traf fi cking markets in looted cultural heritage and poached wildlife. In other words, developed nations bene fi t from these trades while developing nations suffer, and governance regimes attempting to control these global criminal trades prioritise the rational interests and cultural norms of the more powerful market nations over the local interests and cultural histories of communities at the source of the chain of supply. Finally, our third argument is that the emerging intellectual framework of sustainable development, as represented in the UN ’ s goals, may provide a perspective on the issue of traf fi cking culture and nature that can push back against the neocolonial hegemony of international criminal markets such as these.