Regulatory disincentives

Incentives or Disincentives?∗

If a policymaker wishes to encourage members of a population to take a socially beneficial action, should she reward those who take the desired behavior or punish those who do not? For example, should government subsidize the purchase of health insurance or fine the failure to purchase health insurance? This question lies, often implicitly, at the heart of many policy debates, yet there does no...

Structuring Disincentives for Online Criminals

This thesis considers the structural characteristics of online criminal networks from a technical and an economic perspective. Through large-scale measurements, we empirically describe some salient elements of the online criminal infrastructures, and we derive economic models characterizing the associated monetization paths enabling criminal profitability. This analysis reveals the existence of...

kaPoW Webmail: Effective Disincentives Against Spam

Webmail spam poses a significant threat to major webmail providers such as Google GMail, Yahoo! Mail, and Microsoft Live Mail, as well as to individual companies and universities that provide web-based interfaces to their email. Whether spammers create new accounts or hijack existing accounts to send spam, the transmission of spam drives up server operating costs as well as the human costs requ...

Disincentives for Democratic Change in China

Incentives and Disincentives for DNSSEC Deployment

Like many of the Internet’s foundational infrastructures, the Domain Name System (DNS) suffers from a number of security vulnerabilities. Efforts to produce a more secure successor, DNSSEC, have been underway for more than ten years, and a specification is only now reaching a final form; this is an eternity in Internet time. We argue that the reasons for this delay are mainly economic rather th...