An Intrinsic Integrity-Driven Rating Model for a Sustainable Reputation System

In the era of digital markets, the challenge for consumers is discerning quality amidst information asymmetry. While traditional markets use brand mechanisms to address this issue, transferring such systems to internet-based P2P markets, where misleading practices like fake ratings are rampant, remains challenging. Current internet platforms strive to counter this through verification algorithms, but these efforts find themselves in a continuous tug-of-war with counterfeit actions. Exploiting the transparency, immutability, and traceability of blockchain technology, this paper introduces a robust reputation voting system grounded in it. Unlike existing blockchain-based reputation systems, our model harnesses an intrinsically economically incentivized approach to bolster agent integrity. We optimize this model to mirror real-world user behavior, preserving the reputation system's foundational sustainability. Through Monte-Carlo simulations, using both uniform and power-law distributions enabled by an innovative inverse transform method, we traverse a broad parameter landscape, replicating real-world complexity. The findings underscore the promise of a sustainable, transparent, and formidable reputation mechanism. Given its structure, our framework can potentially function as a universal, sustainable oracle for offchain-onchain bridging, aiding entities in perpetually cultivating their reputation. Future integration with technologies like Ring Signature and Zero Knowledge Proof could amplify the system's privacy facets, rendering it particularly influential in the ever-evolving digital domain.Comment: 36 pages,13 figure

Reforming institutions for service delivery : a framework for development assistance with an application to the health, nutrition, and population portfolio

World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (report no. 17300) argued that institutions-the rules of the game that govern production and exchange-shape a country's prospects for sustained market-led growth. The author provides an institutional framework for service delivery, an essential component of state capability. He applies this framework to an evaluation of Bank support for service delivery in the health, nutrition, and population sector. He argues for greater institutional pluralism in the ways the World Bank does business in infrastructure, rural, and social sectors, but cautions against making efficient service delivery an issue of"state versus market."The Bank and its clients face the challenge of fitting menus of"better practice"delivery options to maps of institutional reality. In the health, nutrition, and population sector, the Bank should (1) unbundle and categorize essential health and clinical services according to goods characteristics and (2) integrate country knowledge into operations through upstream assessments of state, political, and social institutions. Overall, the Bank has made progress toward a"goods characteristics"approach, particularly in infrastructure and some rural services-but it has lagged in the social sectors, where support remains largely technocratic. Cross-sector comparisons reveal four generations of support for service delivery. First-generation support focused mainly on physical implementation of projects. Second-generation interventions, which characterized most social service interventions, focused on improving the financial and organizational viability of implementing agencies through technical assistance. Third-generation support was marked by significant unbundling of service delivery activities and clearer links to goods characteristics. In irrigation (1982-94), telecommunications (1980s-present), and transport (1990s), the one-size-fits-all monopoly model gave way to a range of options based on greater private sector and citizen participation in delivery. These included leases, concessions, outsourcing, and contracting as well as building, operating, transfer, and turnover schemes. Fourth-generation interventions are works-in-progress and represent efforts to develop new governance arrangements that systematically combine competition, voice, and hierarchy in the design, delivery, and monitoring of Bank projects. The Bank has a poor track record building country knowledge of institutional endowments that affect service delivery. The author identifies concepts and tools valuable for sector specialists'operations.Enterprise Development&Reform,Public Health Promotion,Health Economics&Finance,Decentralization,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Governance Indicators,Poverty Assessment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance

Shaping a health statistics vision for the 21st century: final report, November 2002

Also available via the World Wide Web.Includes bibliographical references

Emerging Informatics

The book on emerging informatics brings together the new concepts and applications that will help define and outline problem solving methods and features in designing business and human systems. It covers international aspects of information systems design in which many relevant technologies are introduced for the welfare of human and business systems. This initiative can be viewed as an emergent area of informatics that helps better conceptualise and design new world-class solutions. The book provides four flexible sections that accommodate total of fourteen chapters. The section specifies learning contexts in emerging fields. Each chapter presents a clear basis through the problem conception and its applicable technological solutions. I hope this will help further exploration of knowledge in the informatics discipline

Beyond oracles – a critical look at real-world blockchains

This thesis intends to provide answers to the following questions: 1) What is the oracle problem, and how do the limitations of oracles affect different real-world applications? 2) What are the characteristics of the portion of the literature that leaves the oracle problem unaddressed? 3) Who are the main contributors to solving the oracle problem, and which issues are they focusing on? 4) How can the oracle problem be overcome in real-world applications? The first chapter aims to answer the first question through a literature review of the most current papers published in the field, bringing clarity to the blockchain oracle problem by discussing its effects in some of the most promising real-world blockchain applications. Thus, the chapter investigates the sectors of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), healthcare, supply chains, academic records, resource management, and law. By comparing the different applications, the review reveals that heterogeneous issues arise depending on the sector. The analysis supports the view that the more trusted a system is, the less the oracle problem has an impact. The second chapter presents the results of a systematic review intended to highlight the state-of-the-art of real-world blockchain applications using the oracle problem as a lens of analysis. Academic papers proposing real-world blockchain applications were reviewed to see if the authors considered the oracle’s role in the applications and related issues. The results found that almost 90% of the inspected literature neglected the role of oracles, thereby proposing incomplete or irreproducible projects. Through a bibliometric analysis, the third chapter sheds light on the institutions and authors that are actively contributing to the literature on oracles and promoting progress and cooperation. The study shows that, although there is still a lack of collaboration worldwide, there are dedicated authors and institutions working toward a similar and beneficial cause. The results also make it clear that most areas of oracle research are poorly addressed, with some remaining untouched. The fourth and last chapter focuses on a case study of a dairy company operating in the northeast region of Italy. The company applied blockchain technology to support the traceability of their products worldwide, and the study investigated the benefits of their innovation from the point of view of sustainability. The study also considers the role of oracle management, as it is a critical aspect of a blockchain-based project. Thus, the relationship between the company, the blockchain oracle, and the supervising authority is discussed, offering insight into how sustainable innovations can positively impact supply chain management. This work as a whole aims to shed light on blockchain oracles as an academic area of research, explaining why the study of oracles should be considered the backbone of blockchain literature development

Constructing a conceptual framework for market intelligence in the European plant building industry

“If there was only one truth, you could not paint a hundred canvases on a single theme.” Pablo Picasso, 1966 Companies are faced with changing markets, stiffening competition, increasing uncertainty and as a result are thus confronted with a situation that makes it ever more difficult to keep abreast of the latest developments in technology and trends in society. Market intelligence as a methodology of practice provides an organisation with the opportunity to capture competitive information and to transform it into valuable intelligence in order to identify opportunities and threats at an early stage. Systematically reviewing the existing literature on market intelligence and related concepts has shown that, apart from a fragmented state of research worth its while to reconsider, no conceptual framework on market intelligence in the plant building industry is available. An exploratory and qualitative case study that used semi-structured interviews with experts from the industry has led to negotiating a shared sense of understanding and to a refined conceptual framework on plant building market intelligence. The conceptual framework developed consists of three pillars: (1) central intelligence, (2) decentralization to operational divisions and (3) inter-departmental intelligence communities influenced by the characteristics and peculiarities of the very industry. This framework allows for a conceptualization that connects market intelligence to many organizational units and layers, therefore supporting diffusion of intelligence throughout the company. It furthermore fosters exchange of information and knowledge by looking beyond computerized databases, connects with learning processes and builds on integrated analysis frameworks based on social networks as an organic strategy. Significantly, inter-departmental intelligence communities are well suited to provide the connection between intelligence, reflection, action and learning. This is deemed particularly valuable in times where decision making has become ever harder due to turbulent environments, reducing the relevance of plain cost-benefit and probabilistic reasoning approaches

Swarming Reconnaissance Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in a Parallel Discrete Event Simulation

Current military affairs indicate that future military warfare requires safer, more accurate, and more fault-tolerant weapons systems. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are one answer to this military requirement. Technology in the UAV arena is moving toward smaller and more capable systems and is becoming available at a fraction of the cost. Exploiting the advances in these miniaturized flying vehicles is the aim of this research. How are the UAVs employed for the future military? The concept of operations for a micro-UAV system is adopted from nature from the appearance of flocking birds, movement of a school of fish, and swarming bees among others. All of these natural phenomena have a common thread: a global action resulting from many small individual actions. This emergent behavior is the aggregate result of many simple interactions occurring within the flock, school, or swarm. In a similar manner, a more robust weapon system uses emergent behavior resulting in no weakest link because the system itself is made up of simple interactions by hundreds or thousands of homogeneous UAVs. The global system in this research is referred to as a swarm. Losing one or a few individual unmanned vehicles would not dramatically impact the swarms ability to complete the mission or cause harm to any human operator. Swarming reconnaissance is the emergent behavior of swarms to perform a reconnaissance operation. An in-depth look at the design of a reconnaissance swarming mission is studied. A taxonomy of passive reconnaissance applications is developed to address feasibility. Evaluation of algorithms for swarm movement, communication, sensor input/analysis, targeting, and network topology result in priorities of each model\u27s desired features. After a thorough selection process of available implementations, a subset of those models are integrated and built upon resulting in a simulation that explores the innovations of swarming UAVs

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

Trusting AI: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Army’s Professional Expert Knowledge

Integrating artificially intelligent technologies for military purposes poses a special challenge. In previous arms races, such as the race to atomic bomb technology during World War II, expertise resided within the Department of Defense. But in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, expertise dwells mostly within industry and academia. Also, unlike the development of the bomb, effective employment of AI technology cannot be relegated to a few specialists; almost everyone will have to develop some level of AI and data literacy. Complicating matters is AI-driven systems can be a “black box” in that humans may not be able to explain some output, much less be held accountable for its consequences. This inability to explain coupled with the cession to a machine of some functions normally performed by humans risks the relinquishment of some jurisdiction and, consequently, autonomy to those outside the profession. Ceding jurisdiction could impact the American people’s trust in their military and, thus, its professional standing. To avoid these outcomes, creating and maintaining trust requires integrating knowledge of AI and data science into the military’s professional expertise. This knowledge covers both AI technology and how its use impacts command responsibility; talent management; governance; and the military’s relationship with the US government, the private sector, and society.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1955/thumbnail.jp