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Ethnographers have recorded many instances of tokens donated as gifts to attract new partners or strengthen ties to existing ones. We study whether gifts are an effective pledge of the donor’s trustworthiness through an experiment modeled on the trust game. We vary whether the trustee can send a token before the trustor decides whether to transfer money; whether one of the tokens is rendered salient through experimental manipulations (a vote or an incentive-compatible rule of purchase for the tokens); and whether the subjects interact repeatedly or are randomly re-matched in each round. Tokens are frequently sent in all studies in which tokens are available, but repeated interaction, rather than gifts, is the leading behavioral driver in our data. In the studies with random pairs, trustors send significantly more points when the trustee has sent a token. Subjects in a fixed matching achieve comparable levels of trust and trustworthiness in the studies with and without tokens. The trustee’s decision to send a token is not predictive of the amount the trustee returns to the trustor. A token is used more sparingly whenever salient — a novel instance of endogenous value creation in the lab.

The main contributors to sea-level rise (oceans, glaciers, and ice sheets) respond to climate change on timescales ranging from decades to millennia. A focus on the 21st century thus fails to provide a complete picture of the consequences of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions on future sea-level rise and its long-term impacts. Here we identify the committed global mean sea-level rise until 2300 from historical emissions since 1750 and the currently pledged National Determined Contributions (NDC) under the Paris Agreement until 2030. Our results indicate that greenhouse gas emissions over this 280-y period result in about 1 m of committed global mean sea-level rise by 2300, with the NDC emissions from 2016 to 2030 corresponding to around 20 cm or 1/5 of that commitment. We also find that 26 cm (12 cm) of the projected sea-level-rise commitment in 2300 can be attributed to emissions from the top 5 emitting countries (China, United States of America, European Union, India, and Russia) over the 1991–2030 (2016–2030) period. Our findings demonstrate that global and individual country emissions over the first decades of the 21st century alone will cause substantial long-term sea-level rise.

Despite the central role of election pledges in modern representative democracy, it remains uncertain how voters define pledges. We examine this by focusing on four rhetorical dimensions of political statements: the pledge giver, the formulation of commitment, the policy content and quantification. In three conjoint experiments on representative samples totalling around 6,000 respondents in the United States, Britain and Denmark, we find remarkably consistent results. On the one hand, voters consistently differentiate between statements in a highly focused manner: a promise is a promise if it is sincere and realistic – no matter who made it and whether it can be checked. On the other hand, voters are not willing to hold their party accountable for a given statement – even if they consider it an election pledge. We demonstrate that this is the perceptual logic of election pledges in Western democracies.

Enforcement proceedings shall be effective and all procedural guarantees of the right to a fair trial shall be ensured. This article examines the problems of recovery from property pledged by mortgage or pledged for the benefit of third parties. The Law on Civil Procedure of the Republic of Lithuania allows recovery from such property in enforcement proceedings only when the creditor does not contest this possibility. However, this creditor right is not absolute, and the creditor shall not abuse this this right. This article analyses how the protection of a claim secured by a mortgage or pledge must be reconciled with the goal of an effective enforcement process when there is a need to recover from property secured by a mortgage or pledge. The article assesses the procedural problems that arise for the bailiff in order to perform recovery from such property, the legal status of the mortgagee or pledge creditor, and the rights and obligations in the process of execution. The relevant case law shows that one of the fundamental problems in such collection procedures is the objection of the mortgage or pledge creditor to the recovery of the property pledged to them. It also examines how such consent should be expressed, what legal consequences arise when the creditor opposes such recovery, and in which cases recovery from mortgaged or pledged property is possible without the creditor’s consent.

The article presents new provisions of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation on pledge, in particular, on conditions, forms of a pledge agreement, as well as on state registration and registration of pledge. We analyzed the provisions concerning the form of the pledge agreement, the state registration and registration of the pledge. The analysis revealed cases of establishing legal requirements in accordance with the notarial form of the pledge agreement. It is concluded that the agreement on real estate pledge is no longer subject to state registration, and therefore the provisions of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation on state registration and registration of collateral are particularly urgent and require further study, as well as other legislative acts of the Russian Federation. Based on these studies, cases are indicated where the pledge is subject to state registration. The procedure and conditions for state registration of the pledge of exclusive rights are also indicated for the results of intellectual activity and means of individualization. We have now announced the possibility of registering a pledge of other non-residential assets through registration in order to notify the pledge in the register of pledge notices of movable property and at the same time pay attention to the fact that the mortgagee with respect to a third party can refer to the right of pledge belonging to He only from the date of entry of a record of registered pledge.

This study explores how the urban regeneration agenda evolved from a concept to a campaign pledge during the 2017 South Korean presidential election. Previous discussions on agenda-setting have largely focused on public discourse and political parties. Based on the concept of nondecision, however, this study focuses on the dynamics among key actors including politicians and policy entrepreneurs. Conceptualising academic policy entrepreneurs as \"poli-fessors\" in the Korean context, the research illustrates how their roles and interactions with politicians contrast with those of traditional policy entrepreneurs, thereby contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics behind policy agenda-setting in a political context. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, the research yields three key findings. First, although poli-fessors established forums to engage in the presidential election, their involvement was primarily demand-driven–politicians invited them to participate. This actor selection process reflects nondecisions, as specific poli-fessors were closely aligned with agendas in which they had developed expertise. Second, mediators played a critical role in shaping both actor and agenda selection through nondecision mechanisms. Third, a small circle of poli-fessors, through sustained collaboration with politicians, influenced nondecision-making processes that subsequently shaped the nature of their relationships. This contextualised account of agenda-setting illuminates the complex and embedded nature of nondecision-making.

Social media platforms take on increasingly big roles in political advertising. Microtargeting techniques facilitate the display of tailored advertisements to specific subsegments of society. Scholars worry that such techniques might cause political information to be displayed to only very small subgroups of citizens. Or that targeted communication about policy could make the mandate of elected representatives more challenging to interpret. Policy information in general and pledges, in particular, have received much scientific scrutiny. Scholars have focused largely on party manifestos, but policy information and pledges communicated via online advertisements offer a new arena with new dynamics. This study uses Facebook’s ad library to describe how Dutch political campaigns advertise policy information and pledges in the run-up to the 2019 European Elections. The results show that much policy information is displayed to small subsegments of society. These findings provide evidence for concerns about pledge obfuscation, voter manipulation and mandate interpretation.

Current corporate disclosures regarding carbon emissions lack generally accepted accounting rules. The transactional carbon accounting system described here takes the rules of historical cost accounting for operating assets as a template for generating carbon emissions (CE) statements comprising a balance sheet and a flow statement. The asset side of the CE balance sheet reports the carbon emissions embodied in operating assets. The liability side conveys the firm’s cumulative direct emissions into the atmosphere as well as the cumulative emissions embodied in goods acquired from suppliers less those sold to customers. Flow statements report the company’s annual corporate carbon footprint calculated as the cradle-to-gate carbon footprint of goods sold during the current period. Taken together, balance sheets and flow statements generate key performance indicators of a company’s past, current, and future performance in the domain of carbon emissions.