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The purpose of this paper is to study filer identities and voting outcomes of Canadian shareholder proposals and their impact on shareholders' wealth during the period from 2001 to 2008.

In total, 762 Canadian shareholder proposals and related information on targeted firms were collected from the Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE) and the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) databases. Statistical analyses are carried out on the features of shareholder proposals. Regression analyses are performed on voting outcomes, and an event study is conducted to test the impact of shareholder proposals on stock prices.

The authors' analyses show that proposals submitted by institutions or coordinated shareholder groups receive stronger support than those submitted by individuals and religious groups. Targeted firms are more willing and more likely to reach agreements with institutional investors, which in turn prompts activists to withdraw their proposals. The voting behavior of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) has a significant impact on voting outcomes. The targeted firms' stock prices respond substantially to news on proposals submitted by institutional and coordinated investors and proposals on social and environmental issues.

In addition to in‐depth analyses (issues, filers, voting outcomes, and impacts on stock price) of Canadian shareholder proposals, this paper explores the voting behaviour and impact of a large institutional shareholder that has been passive in filing shareholder proposals. Special attention is paid to Canadian features of shareholder activism, and differences between Canadian and US shareholder proposals are highlighted and discussed. The paper thus extends shareholder activism studies from focusing on open shareholder activists to investigating passive institutional shareholders.

In seeking to extend rational choice theory from “market” to “political” behaviour, economists have encountered a paradox: namely, that the act of voting itself appears to be inconsistent with the assumption of rationality. This is true not only when self‐interest is assumed, but also when altruistic behaviour (at least in its non‐Kantian form) is allowed for. This article surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of the decision to participate in voting, and concludes that this decision is responsive to changes in the expected benefits and costs of voting; even though the expected costs of voting must normally outweigh the expected benefits. Interpretations of this behaviour include the possibility that voters act rationally, but are misinformed about the likely effectiveness of their votes; alternatively, the electorate may include more Kantians than economists have generally been willing to admit.

The purpose of this study is to present and discuss some core issues regarding the transparency of the eVoting process. Apart from the protection of voting secrecy, the possible manipulation of votes, even of the entire election, is one of the key issues in eVoting. Comparatively few Supreme Court rulings are available for eVoting, as it is a new field. Where there are rulings available, they often focus on the case at hand and do not derive general principles. On 3 March 2009, the German Constitutional Court published a ruling on the use of voting terminals[1] from which also general principles can be derived far beyond the case itself.

Apart from the protection of voting secrecy, the possible manipulation of votes, even of the entire election, is one of the key issues in eVoting. Comparatively few Supreme Court rulings are available for eVoting, as it is a new field. Where there are rulings available, they often focus on the case at hand and do not derive general principles. On 3 March 2009, the German Constitutional Court published a ruling on the use of voting terminals[1] from which general principles can also be derived far beyond the case itself.

The paper presented some core issues in eVoting transparency as required by the ruling of the German Constitutional Court. In particular, it suggested a way to define and operationalise the terms “audit chain”, “count” and “recount”, which arguably represent the core issues in eVoting transparency and auditability. Furthermore, the paper introduced a model to map the key security dimensions in an eVoting system and the degree to which they are fulfilled by technical, not just organisational, means, with auditability being the dimension discussed in this contribution.

The paper only considers political elections and starts off the framework and requirements set by the German Constitutional Court. With one exception, these requirements can be seen as rather generic for most Western-style democracies, the exception being observability and auditability of the election by the general public.

The paper derives concrete design principles for remote eVoting systems.

The paper develops a security framework for remote eVoting from given legal requirements. After an analysis of popular existing eVoting protocols, a generic eVoting protocol is derived satisfying these requirements.

Currently, electronic election is one of the most popular issues of e-democracy. This has led to the development of applications and several security mechanisms to address such necessity. The problem that arises is that such applications are created either on demand for a specific election process, or experimentally for scientific purposes. The purpose of this study is to present a new e-voting system, called VOTAN. The VOTAN system involves a combination of new features with basic advantages, the implementation as open source software, its modular organization covering the functional requirements of a typical electronic voting system (EVS) and the capability of data analysis of candidates and voters.

VOTAN stands for VOTes Analyzer. It is a secure application for the conduct of electronic elections through the internet based on its own security protocol. It also includes a data analysis component which analyzes the election results and investigates the factors that play a crucial role. The major advantages of the system are that it is an open source and includes a data analysis module that can distinguish important variables from the elections and help make predictions for the outcome based on the selected variables. It is a practical solution to the existing e-voting applications and is ideal for small communities such as organizations, universities and chambers.

Its main advantage, compared to similar e-voting systems, is the integration of the data analysis component. The analysis of the data produced from elections is considered a critical process to fully comprehend the outcome of the elections and its correlation to specific attributes/variables of the election process. The data analysis module is a unique feature of VOTAN. It facilitates the selection of the most important attributes that influence the outcome of elections and creates a mathematical model to predict the outcome of an election based on the selected attributes. The method used in the module is the LDA.

The originality of the paper derives from the data analysis component and its security protocol/schema that fulfils several requirements.

This chapter investigates voting decisions by mutual funds in a variety of management-sponsored proposals in Israel. Our main findings are that mutual fund managers tend to vote with management and oppose only about 30 percent of all potentially harmful proposals. Larger equity holdings by the fund manager and better prior performance by the firm are found to be negatively associated with the odds of voting against management. Also, mutual funds managed by banks are found to exhibit better monitoring than mutual funds managed by private investment companies. We find that bank fund managers are more likely to vote against management than other mutual fund managers. We further find that non-bank funds tend to increase equity holding following the meeting regardless of their vote, whereas bank funds tend to follow the “Wall Street Rule” and reduce their equity holdings after voting against management.

In an effort to increase turnout at elections the UK government has been piloting electronic voting. At the 2002 local elections five councils tested remote Internet voting for the first time. Swindon Borough Council conducted the largest pilot, offering remote Internet voting to all voters. Almost 15,000 voters were surveyed as to their motivation for choosing their voting method. Turnout did increase by 3.5 per cent but it is impossible to state conclusively that this was due to the availability of the Internet voting option, since most Internet voters were already regular voters. Future pilots should allow a more conclusive assessment of the impact on turnout of remote Internet voting.

This paper aims to present the verification process conducted to assess the functional correctness of the voting system. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) is the most important research institution in Argentina. It depends directly from Argentina’s President but its internal authorities are elected by around 8,000 research across the country. During 2011, the CONICET developed a Web voting system to replace the traditional mail-based process. In 2012 and 2014, CONICET conducted two Web election with no complaints from candidates and voters. Before moving the system into production, CONICET asked the authors to conduct a functional and security assessment of it.

This process is the result of integrating formal, semi-formal and informal verification activities from formal proof to code inspection and model-based testing.

Given the resources and time available, a reasonable level of confidence on the correctness of the application could be transmitted to senior management.

A formal specification of the requirements must be developed.

Formal methods and semi-formal activities are seldom applied to Web applications.

Luxembourg is the jurisdiction of choice for many private equity and venture capital investors/funds. Though the optimum balance of financing instruments in relation to any structure varies according to its particular circumstances, one factor that all Luxembourg domiciled FDI structures have in common is the requirement for an appropriate level of equity investment. This article intends to summarize some of the topics frequently encountered in relation to equity structuring choices.

Author details the different steps and choices available to investors and funds. The article offers answers to questions to provide a broad, yet detailed, overview of the process and journey; from selecting the vehicle right through to distributing to investors, governance, and compliance.

To avoid an expensive mistake, it is paramount that the private equity or venture capital investors and management team receive detailed advice to ensure: (i) the deal is structured in the most tax efficient manner possible and the commercial deal is suitable for all parties, and (ii) the deal is structured in a manner which is effective under Luxembourg law, for both tax and legal purposes.

It is important that non-Luxembourg lawyers are able to identify key issues when negotiating the terms of the investment documents, in particular, the articles of association and shareholders' agreement.

Practical guidance from Luxembourg lawyer specializing in corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital and private equity transactions.

The purpose of this paper is to aim mainly at social public decision-making problems, studies the corresponding relationship between different voting rule combinations and the final results, and discusses the quantitative relationships between group intelligence (final votes) and individual intelligence (everyone) to defend democracy under the circumstance of rapid development of network technology, and crowd intelligence becomes more complicated and universal.

After summarizing the crowd co-decisions of related studies, the standards, frameworks, techniques, methods and tools have been discussed according to the characteristics of large-scale simulations.

The contributions of this paper will be useful for both academics and practitioners for formulating VV&A in large-scale simulations.

This paper will help researchers solve the social public decision-making problems in large-scale simulations.