The notion of contracts as reference points provides the basis for a deeper understanding of important phenomena such as the employment contract, vertical integration, firm scope, authority, and delegation. Previous experiments lend support to this notion but they ignore realistic aspects of trading relationships such as informal agreements and ex-post renegotiation or revision. Here we show th...

Interpolity interaction and regional control were central features of all early state societies, taking the form of trade-embedded in political processes to varying degrees-or interregional conquest strategies meant to expand the polity's control or influence over neighboring territories. Cross-cultural analyses of early statecraft suggest that territorial expansion was an integral part of the ...

Wireless networks break the implicit assumptions that supported authorization in wired networks (that is: if one could connect, then one must be authorized). However, ensuring that only authorized users can access a campus-wide wireless network creates many challenges: we must permit authorized guests to access the same network resources that internal users do; we must accommodate the de-centra...

This paper distinguishes between governance structure and contractual form. The basic premise is that researchers often confuse these two concepts when they develop or empirically test models within the transaction cost framework. In the paper I utilize a simple principal-agent model to show that transaction cost factors affect both contractual form and governance structure, but not identically...

Taking our point of departure in Oliver Williamson’s notion of the “impossibility of selective intervention,” we analyze the tension in firms between authority and delegation. The tension arises because a hierarchical superior can always in principle overrule a hierarchical inferior. Negative consequences for motivation and productivity at the level of employees and created value at the level o...

T issue of delegating pricing responsibility to the salesforce is of interest to marketing academics and practitioners. It has been shown by Lal (1986) that under certain situations with information asymmetry, it is more profitable for the firm to delegate pricing authority to the salesforce than to have centralized pricing. In this paper we re-examine situations where information asymmetry exi...

A proxy blind signature scheme is a special form of blind signature which allowed a designated person called proxy signer to sign on behalf of two or more original signers without knowing the content of the message or document. It combines the advantages of proxy signature, blind signature and multi-signature scheme. This paper describes an efficient proxy blind multi-signature scheme. The secu...

The authentication of users in distributed systems poses special problems because users lack the ability to encrypt and decrypt. The same problems arise when users wish to delegate some of their authority to nodes, after mutual authentication. In most systems today, the user is forced to trust the node he wants to use. In a more satisfactory design, the user carries a smart-card with suucient c...

This study assessed the learning needs of hospital nurses in northern Jordan to develop programming recommendations for future continuing education (CE) efforts. Although few CE programs exist, a response rate of 85% (n = 171) suggested these nurses have important learning needs. Nurses identified eight priority content areas: critical care, management of cardiac arrest, emergency room nursing,...

In Role-based Access control (RBAC) permissions are associated with roles and users are made members of roles thereby acquiring the associated permissions. User delegation in RBAC is the ability of one user (called the delegating user) who is a member of the delegated role to authorize another user (called the delegate user) to become a member of the delegated role. This paper proposes a simple...