Contracting with Third Parties

Contracting with Third Parties

odels of bilateral contracting, such as the canonical holdup model, typically assume that third parties are not available. Given this assumption, the equilibrium outcome is not first-best efficient if contracts can be renegotiated. To be more specific, suppose an architect and a builder must cooperate to build a building. The quality of the building will depend on three things: the quality of t...

Towards Tiny Trusted Third Parties

Many security protocols hypothesize the existence of a trusted third party (TTP) to ease handling of computation and data too sensitive for the other parties involved. Subsequent discussion usually dismisses these protocols as hypothetical or impractical, under the assumption that trusted third parties cannot exist. However, the last decade has seen the emergence of hardware-based devices that,...

Exploitable Results by Third Parties

Third Thoughts on Contracting Out

L i k e many libertarians, I used to accept without question the idea that contracting out for government services was a good idea. After all, it puts production back into the hands of relatively efficient private producers. However, after reviewing the literature o n contracting out for law enforcement services (Benson 1990, pp. 17999), I had some second thoughts, concluding that while contrac...

Rule Enforcement with Third Parties in Secure Cooperative Data Access

In this paper, we consider the scenario where a set of parties need to cooperate with one another. To safely exchange the information, a set of authorization rules is given to the parties. In some cases, a trusted third party is required to perform the expected operations. Since interactions with the third party can be expensive and there maybe risk of data exposure/misuse, it is important to m...