Stakeholder perceptions of online peer mark moderation in university teamwork

Peer assessment can provide a convenient solution to the problem of marking individual students fairly in group assignments. The developing methodology has numerous benefits for enhanced student learning and transferable skill development. Peer Assessment is not, however, universally embraced: critics cite potential drawbacks including collusion and vindictive marking and this paper briefly reviews the state of the art; it goes on to describe a new web-based peer mark moderation tool and outline the results of a quantitative research project based upon its use. Whilst much of the received data confirms and updates previous literature, important new insights are gained into the thoughts of students, who appear to recognise and value the fairness they believe peer mark moderation can offer. Statistical analysis verifies the lack of collusion associated with the web-based system and students comment positively on the system’s anonymity and its ability to recognise different levels of achievement within teams

Collusion and Collective Action in the Patent System: A Proposal for Patent Bounties

Persistent commentary contends that the Patent Office is issuing patents that appropriate public domain concepts at an alarming frequency. Complaints of low patent quality enjoy growing resonance with regard to business methods, computer software, and other inventions for which patents were not traditionally sought. In this article, Professor Jay Thomas explains how the judiciary\u27s lenient view of patentable subject matter and utility standards, along with miserly congressional funding policies, have rendered the Patent Office an increasingly porous agency. Professor Thomas next reviews existing proposals for improving patent quality, including the conventional wisdom that adoption of an opposition system will contribute meaningfully to the solution of our patent quality problem. Exploring the political economy of patent challenges, Professor Thomas reasons that oppositions do little to solve collective action problems, the possibility of collusion between the prior art holder and patentee, and the existence of the first inventor defense. Professor Thomas instead proposes that the Patent Office recruit members of the public to act as private patent examiners. By awarding prior art informants with a bounty assessed against applicants, the Patent Office can restore order to the patent system and reduce its social costs

Anonymous credit cards and their collusion analysis

Communications networks are traditionally used to bring information together. They can also be used to keep information apart in order to protect personal privacy. A cryptographic protocol specifies a process by which some information is transferred among some users and hidden from others. We show how to implement anonymous credit cards using simple cryptographic protocols. We pose, and solve, a collusion problem which determines whether it is possible for a subset of users to discover information that is designed to be hidden from them during or after execution of the anonymous credit card protocol

Incentives under collusion in a two-agent hidden-action model of a financial enterprize

This study analyzes collusion in an enterprize in which concerns about hedging cannot be ignored. In our two-agent single-task hidden-action model, where all the parties involved have exponential utility functions and the principal owning normally distributed observable and verifiable returns is restricted to o®er linear contracts, agents may exploit all feasible collusion opportunities via enforceable side contracts. Hence in general, an optimal incentive compatible and individually rational contract is not necessarily immune to collusion. We demonstrate that collusion may be ignored when making the agents work with the highest effort profile is profitable for the principal and either of the following holds: (1) mean of the return is only a®ected by the first agent's effort level, whereas variance of that is only affected by the second agent's, (2) mean is increasing and variance is decreasing separately in effort levels of both of them. On the other hand, for situations in which any of these assumptions are violated, numerical examples, showing that collusion may make the principal strictly worse off, are provided. For the justification of linear contracts as was done in the model of Holmstrom and Milgrom (1987) we consider a variant of its generalization given by Sung (1995), into which collusion possibilities are incorporated. In that continuous-time repeated agency problem including collusion, we prove the optimality of linear contracts

The Quality of Equilibria for Set Packing Games

We introduce set packing games as an abstraction of situations in which $n$ selfish players select subsets of a finite set of indivisible items, and analyze the quality of several equilibria for this class of games. Assuming that players are able to approximately play equilibrium strategies, we show that the total quality of the resulting equilibrium solutions is only moderately suboptimal. Our results are tight bounds on the price of anarchy for three equilibrium concepts, namely Nash equilibria, subgame perfect equilibria, and an equilibrium concept that we refer to as $k$-collusion Nash equilibrium

Investor's increased shareholding due to entrepreneur-manager collusion

This study presents an investor/entrepreneur model in which the entrepreneur has opportunities to manipulate the workings of the project via hidden arrangements. We provide the optimal contracts in the presence and absence of such hidden arrangements. The contracts specify the shareholding arrangement between investor and entrepreneur. Moreover, we render an exact condition necessary for the credit market to form

Exploiting Weak Supermodularity for Coalition-Proof Mechanisms

Under the incentive-compatible Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism, coalitions of participants can influence the auction outcome to obtain higher collective profit. These manipulations were proven to be eliminated if and only if the market objective is supermodular. Nevertheless, several auctions do not satisfy the stringent conditions for supermodularity. These auctions include electricity markets, which are the main motivation of our study. To characterize nonsupermodular functions, we introduce the supermodularity ratio and the weak supermodularity. We show that these concepts provide us with tight bounds on the profitability of collusion and shill bidding. We then derive an analytical lower bound on the supermodularity ratio. Our results are verified with case studies based on the IEEE test systems