Recent research demonstrates that videogames enhance literacy, attention, reaction time, and higher-level thinking. Several scholars have suggested that massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) such as Everquest and Second Life have educational potential, but we have little data about what happens when such tools are introduced in the classroom. This paper reports findings from two MMO-based courses in the context of situated learning theory. The first course, focused on the ethnography of on-line games, used the game Everquest as a vehicle for teaching research methods to 36 students in an undergraduate communication course. The second course used the game Second Life to teach the fundamentals of videogame design and criticism. Synthesizing comments from student web logs with data collected from followup surveys, the paper highlights key findings and offers concrete suggestions for instructors contemplating the use of multiplayer games in their own courses. Recommending that potential virtual environments be selected on the basis of genre, accessibility, and extensibility, it is suggested that game-based assignments are most effective when they build bridges between the domain of the game world and an overlapping domain of professional practice.

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Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) in the New Media Classroom

A major argument for upward harmonization of national industrial pollution standards is that unregulated trade competition among countries with wide disparities in standards will exert downward pressure on standards, particularly in the countries with the most stringent standards (the “race to bottom” thesis). But empirical evidence indicates that it is in the rapidly industrializing countries themselves, rather than in the countries with higher standards, that competitiveness concerns exert downward pressure on standards, creating a “stuck at the bottom” problem. The greater sensitivity of rapidly industrializing countries to competitiveness pressures can be explained by the unresponsiveness of their political institutions. This article calls for a radically different approach to the problem of standards and trade competition, proposing an agreement on common minimum standards to be negotiated solely among the rapidly industrializing countries themselves.

Trade Competition and Pollution Standards: “Race to the Bottom” or “Stuck at the Bottom”:

Building on John Ruggie’s pioneering study of multilateralism, this paper presents an analogous study of multistakeholder governance, or multistakeholderism. Its central argument is that multistakeholderism is, as yet, a much less well-defined institutional form. Cases exhibit significant variation both in the combinations of actor classes entitled to participate and the nature of authority relations among those actors. The first section discusses multistakeholderism as an institutional form, and proposes a taxonomy of its types. This section also briefly addresses the implications of the analysis for International Relations theory. The paper then conducts a comparative analysis of multistakeholderism, applying the taxonomy to five illustrative cases. It demonstrates the degree of inter-case variation, and the range of issue-areas across which the institutional form is employed and invoked by actors. Three cases are drawn from the increasingly contentious area of Internet governance; the paper thus makes a secondary contribution to this growing literature. The paper’s most striking finding in this regard is that Internet governance often fails to live up to its multistakeholder rhetoric. Other cases include governance of securities regulation and the governance of corporate social responsibility. The paper concludes by examining the implications of our argument, and identifying areas for further research.

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Multistakeholderism: anatomy of an inchoate global institution

The Bankers' New Clothes, by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2013), pp. xv + 398.

This new edition of Corporate Insolvency Law builds on the unique and influential analytical framework established in previous editions - which outlines the values to be served by insolvency law and the need for it to further corporate as well as broader social ends. Examining insolvency law in the fast-evolving commercial world, the third edition covers the host of new laws, policies and practices that have emerged in response to the fresh corporate and financial environments of the post-2008 crisis era. This third edition includes a new chapter on the growing issue of cross border insolvency and deals with a host of recent developments, notably; the consolidation of the rescue culture in the UK, the rise of the pre-packaged administration, and the substantial replacement of administrative receivership with administration. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, professionals and academics, Corporate Insolvency Law offers an organised basis for rising to the challenges of an ever-shifting area of the law.

Corporate Insolvency Law: Perspectives and Principles

Increased legal harmonization reinforces the need for a new way to test legal rules. As legal diversity decreases, there are fewer alternate rules to draw from, and thus potentially useful de facto experimentation with alternative rules becomes rarer and more difficult. This article argues that the ability to test legal rules in virtual worlds could help to solve a long-running, and worsening problem in the design of legal rules - the barriers to experimentation caused by an increasing tendency to the harmonization of law. In a world where real world experimentation with legal rules is likely to be useful, but also difficult and expensive, experimentation with legal rules in Virtual Worlds may be a valuable substitute. Large numbers of enthusiastic players in Virtual Worlds could test legal rules in an environment closer to the real world than many of the experiments that behavioral economists run to test economic behavior.

Virtual Worlds, Real Rules

It is likely that the impact of statutes on transactions in corporate control in the United Kingdom will increase in the near future, whether as a result of recent scandals or because of the introduction of legislation to harmonise rules within the EEC For these reasons it is appropriate to consider again the interests of those who are affected by the operation of the market for corporate control Traditionally, comment on, and regulation of, take-overs has focused on three issues: (1) the maintenance of proper balances between managerial and ownership interests within companies which are the targets of take-over attempts, (2) the maintenance of a balance between the interests of predators and shareholders in the target company, and (3) the protection of the public interest The first issue can be traced to the identification by Berle and Means of a potential conflict between the interests of owners and the interests of controllers of large corporations Since Berle and Means, much of the literature about corporations has concentrated on whether constraints on corporate managerial power are necessary in order to protect the interests of shareholders2 One of the most significant constraints on corporate managerial power seems to many commentators to be the market for corporate control, and the threat of displacement which it poses to corporate managements3 The idea of the market for corporate control seems to have originated with Berle and Means,4 but has since been refined5 The second issue arises out of the concern of regulators that predators should not profit at the expense of target company shareholders,6 and some of the refinements of the corporate control theory are relevant to this issue In practice, the third issue, the protection of the public interest, usually involves questions of competition policy7 These three issues all have different origins, but economic theory is relevant in all cases, as it suggests that markets operate in the public interest, except where there is market

https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1604&context=fac_articles

Corporate Control: Markets and Rules

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Demutualization of Financial Exchanges: Business as Usual

This article examines the relationship between business organisation law and policies designed to encourage entrepreneurial activity. In particular the article focuses on the UK's regime for disciplining directors of failed companies, and notes that the United States does not have comparable rules. In the United States, director disqualification is designed to protect investors, as part of the protections necessary for the capital markets, whereas in the United Kingdom director disqualification is designed to protect creditors. The United States tends to rely on private, rather than public, mechanisms for the protection of creditors.

Caroline Bradley

Papers

Virtual Worlds, Real Rules

Corporate Control: Markets and Rules

Virtual Worlds, Real Rules

Demutualization of Financial Exchanges: Business as Usual

Enterprise and Entrepreneurship: The Impact of Director Disqualification