Offshore and outsourced development are the latest facts of life of professional software building. The easily identifiable advantages of these trends – such as cost benefits, continuous delivery and support – have already been explored to considerable extent. But how does offshore and outsourced development affect the delegation of responsibilities to components of a software system? In this p...

A ubiquitous feature of modern statutory law is delegation. Legislation typically delegates policy implementation to a bureaucracy. This delegation presents a dilemma. The specialized knowledge of an expert agency may be necessary to unravel the technical uncertainties surrounding the impact of alternative policy actions; however, the policy preferences of bureaucrats are often different from t...

Building support for delegation services into an identity federation system enhances its flexibility and scalability. Users may need to delegate all (or a subset) of their access rights or privileges to other parties in the system. However, the Liberty Alliance, an industry consortium that aims to build open standard-based specifications for identity federation systems, does not include delegat...

The delegation of administrative decision-making powers is explored in the following pages as a legal technique to enhance co-operation between politics and administration, both within the policy-making and in the domains of implementation of policy and law. Delegation, as a legal instrument, also has organisational and managerial consequences insofar as it suggests certain organisational patte...

In predicate encryption systems, given a capability, one can evaluate one or more predicates on the encrypted data, while all other information about the plaintext remains hidden. We consider the first such systems to permit delegation of capabilities. In a system that supports delegation, a user Alice who has a capability can delegate to Bob a more restrictive capability, which allows him to l...

There is currently a great deal of interest in the development of intelligent agents. While there is little agreement on exactly what constitutes an intelligent agent, many definitions embody a user interface model that differs from the traditional one where users perform tasks with the help of computer-based “tools." In contrast, the "delegation" model associated with agents is based on entrus...

We experimentally investigate delegation and communication as two alternative means of coordinations among individuals with misaligned interests. We implement in the laboratory two delegation-communication games in which a principal chooses whether to delegate her decision-making authority to an informed agent or to make the decision herself after a cheap-talk communication with the agent. In t...

We introduce Delegation Logic (DL), a logic-based knowledge representation (i.e., language) that deals with authorization in large-scale, open, distributed systems. Of central importance in any system for deciding whether requests should be authorized in such a system are delegation of authority, negation of authority, and conflicts between authorities. DL’s approach to these issues and to the ...

Multi-agent systems have a reputation for bringing with them the property of robustness. However, multi-agent systems need to be specifically designed to display this property and until now it is unclear how this can be achieved. One way of approaching this, is to try to simulate social systems, as social order is in close analogy to robustness. We discuss this analogy, give an attempt to a def...

Collaborative robotic systems, such as unmanned aircraft systems, are becoming technologically mature enough to be integrated into civil society. To gain practical use and acceptance, a verifiable, principled and well-defined foundation for interactions between human operators and autonomous systems is needed. In this paper, we propose and specify such a formally grounded collaboration framewor...