Essays on Prosocial Price Premiums

abstract: In two independent and thematically connected chapters, I investigate consumers' willingness to pay a price premium in response to product development that entails prosocial attributes (PATs), those that allude to the reduction of negative externalities to benefit society, and to an innovative participatory pricing design called 'Pay-What-You-Want' (PWYW) pricing, a mechanism that relinquishes the determination of payments in exchange for private goods to the consumers themselves partly relying on their prosocial preferences to drive positive payments. First, I propose a novel statistical approach built on the choice based contingent valuation technique to estimate incremental willingness to pay (IWTP) for PATs that accounts for consumer heterogeneity, dependence in the decision making processes, and incentive compatibility. I validate the approach by estimating IWTP for a variety of PATs and contrast the theoretical and managerial benefits of using the proposed approach over extant techniques used in the literature for this purpose. Second, I propose a general and flexible statistical modeling framework for estimating PWYW payments that exceed zero. It relies on the joint estimation of three types of consumer decision processes namely, the consumer propensity to default to an explicit price recommendation, the propensity to pay a least legitimate price, and the payment of a freely-chosen non-zero payment. Of particular interest is the model's ability to account for a wide variety of design constraints such as the setting of price bounds, explicit price recommendations, and the provision of a menu of discrete prices to choose from. I validate the approach by estimating PWYW payments for a variety of products such as music licenses, snacks, and sports tickets. I specifically examine and report the differential impact of three managerially controllable variables namely, 'payment anonymity', 'information on payment recipients' and 'information of product value/quality'.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Business Administration 201

A decision-making model to guide securing blockchain deployments

Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudo-identity accredit with the paper that sparked the implementation of Bitcoin, is famously quoted as remarking, electronically of course, that “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try and convince you, sorry” (Tsapis, 2019, p. 1). What is noticeable, 12 years after the famed Satoshi paper that initiated Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008), is that blockchain at the very least has staying power and potentially wide application. A lesser known figure Marc Kenisberg, founder of Bitcoin Chaser which is one of the many companies formed around the Bitcoin ecosystem, summarised it well saying “…Blockchain is the tech - Bitcoin is merely the first mainstream manifestation of its potential” (Tsapis, 2019, p. 1). With blockchain still trying to reach its potential and still maturing on its way towards a mainstream technology the main question that arises for security professionals is how do I ensure we do it securely? This research seeks to address that question by proposing a decision-making model that can be used by a security professional to guide them through ensuring appropriate security for blockchain deployments. This research is certainly not the first attempt at discussing the security of the blockchain and will not be the last, as the technology around blockchain and distributed ledger technology is still rapidly evolving. What this research does try to achieve is not to delve into extremely specific areas of blockchain security, or get bogged down in technical details, but to provide a reference framework that aims to cover all the major areas to be considered. The approach followed was to review the literature regarding blockchain and to identify the main security areas to be addressed. It then proposes a decision-making model and tests the model against a fictitious but relevant real-world example. It concludes with learnings from this research. The reader can be the judge, but the model aims to be a practical valuable resource to be used by any security professional, to navigate the security aspects logically and understandably when being involved in a blockchain deployment. In contrast to the Satoshi quote, this research tries to convince the reader and assist him/her in understanding the security choices related to every blockchain deployment.Thesis (MSc) -- Faculty of Science, Computer Science, 202

Four Essays on Economic Preferences

This thesis consists of four independent chapters. Each chapter contributes experimental evidence to our knowledge on economic preferences. Chapter one shows that a preference for truth-telling per se is even more prevalent than previous research suggests. Chapter 2 investigates the relationship between economic preferences and psychological personality measures and arrives at the conclusion that the degree of association between the two concepts is rather small and that they are complementary in explaining heterogeneity in life outcomes. Chapter 3 validates non-incentivized survey measures for key economic preferences, i.e. risk taking, time discounting and social preferences, by examining their predictive power for behavior in incentivized economic choice experiments. Chapter 4 shows that the variation in preferences across countries as documented in Falk, Becker, Dohmen, Enke, Huffman, and Sunde (2015) has deep cultural origins. Chapter 1 attends to what is often called a non-standard preference: a preference for truth-telling per se.2 We implement a truth-telling experiment, in which misreporting cannot be detected and participants have a strong monetary incentive to misreport, with a representative population sample which we call at home. We nd that aggregate reporting behavior closely resembles the distribution that would result if everyone reported truthfully. This contrasts previous evidence from laboratory experiments which also documented substantial levels of truthful reporting as well, but consistently found considerable degrees of cheating. Since our partici pants made their reports via the phone while participants in laboratory experiments typically entered their reports into the computer, we conduct an additional laboratory experiment to rule out the possibility that the difference between behavior in our study and previous research is mainly driven by the difference in communication modes. Similarly, we can rule out that it is the difference in the subject pools - a representative sample versus the typical student participants in laboratory experiments - that explains the much higher level of truth-telling in our study: the behavior of the students in our representative sample does not differ from the behavior of the rest of the sample. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between economic preferences and psychological personality measures. Using data from incentivized laboratory experiments and representative samples of the German population it shows that the association between the two concepts is rather low and that the two concepts are complementary in explaining heterogeneity in life outcomes. Chapter 3 validates survey measures for the six key economic preferences - risk taking, time discounting, trust, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity - by assessing their (joint) explanatory power in explaining behavior in incentivized choice experiments. This results in a preference module consisting of two items per preference - one typically being a hypothetical version of the incentivized experiment and the other one being a subjective self-assessment. Next, we adjust the module by reducing complexity and excluding culturally loaded wording to allow implementability across heterogeneous participants, e.g. in terms of cultural or educational background, and across survey modes. We test this "streamlined" module in the field in 22 countries of diverse cultural backgrounds. The resulting feedback calls for only minor adjustments and overall confirms a good implementability of our preference module. Chapter 45 explores whether differences in culture can explain part of the varia tion in economic preferences we see across countries around the globe as documented in Falk, Becker, Dohmen, Enke, Huffman, and Sunde (2015) by using a specific feature of languages as a proxy for culture. Speakers of languages which require the speaker to grammatically mark the future when talking about future events are less patient and less prosocial than speakers of languages which lack such a grammatical requirement. Heterogeneity in preferences across countries and cultures seems to be partly driven by deep cultural differences

Publicly Verifiable Zero Knowledge from (Collapsing) Blockchains

Publicly Verifiable Zero-Knowledge proofs are known to exist only from setup assumptions such as a trusted Common Reference String (CRS) or a Random Oracle. Unfortunately, the former requires a trusted party while the latter does not exist. Blockchains are distributed systems that already exist and provide certain security properties (under some honest majority assumption), hence, a natural recent research direction has been to use a blockchain as an alternative setup assumption. In TCC 2017 Goyal and Goyal proposed a construction of a publicly verifiable zero-knowledge (pvZK) proof system for some proof-of-stake blockchains. The zero-knowledge property of their construction however relies on some additional and not fully specified assumptions about the current and future behavior of honest blockchain players. In this paper, we provide several contributions. First, we show that when using a blockchain to design a provably secure protocol, it is dangerous to rely on demanding additional requirements on behaviors of the blockchain players. We do so by showing an “attack of the clones” whereby a malicious verifier can use a smart contract to slyly (not through bribing) clone capabilities of honest stakeholders and use those to invalidate the zero-knowledge property of the proof system by Goyal and Goyal. Second, we propose a new publicly verifiable zero-knowledge proof system that relies on non-interactive commitments and on an assumption on the min-entropy of some blocks appearing on the blockchain. Third, motivated by the fact that blockchains are a recent innovation and their resilience in the long run is still controversial, we introduce the concept of collapsing blockchain, and we prove that the zero-knowledge property of our scheme holds even if the blockchain eventually becomes insecure and all blockchain players eventually become dishonest

Towards non-technological innovation: communicating environmental science to the tourism workforce

Karmen Lužar investigated cross-sectoral communication as an example of non-technological innovation. Her study aims to improve environmental science communication to the tourism workforce. The study highlights the importance of detailed knowledge of the audience and provides recommendations regarding the messages and the media to be used

An Efficient Proxy Raffle Protocol with Anonymity-Preserving

[[abstract]]In 2005, Chen et al. implemented a proxy raffle scheme for the Internet. Unfortunately, their scheme is unable to withstand Denial of Service (DoS) and impersonation attacks. We consequently propose a novel version of this scheme, in this paper, which can resist these malicious attacks. The security of our scheme is based on symmetric and asymmetric cryptosystems. A timestamp mechanism is also applied to prevent suffering the replay attack. Specifically, the communication load of our scheme is less than that of Chen et al.'s scheme. Thus, we can implement our method for the Internet as well as mobile devices

Sneakerheads’ Assessment of Sneaker Value and Behaviors throughout the Sneaker Ownership Cycle

The purpose of the present study was to investigate value perceptions and consumption behaviors of sneakerheads who are mixed-role resellers of sneakers. “Sneakerhead” is a term given to those who collect and wear sneakers with a vast amount of effort and resources (Semmelhack, Garcia, Lepri, Willis, & Hatfield, 2015). “Mixed-role resellers” is a term given to individuals who collect, use, and resell consumer goods (Chu & Liao, 2007). Traditional consumer behavior frameworks mostly focus on behaviors surrounding pre-acquisition, purchase, and use of goods initially purchased by the consumer for his or her own use (Boyd & McConocha, 1996). These frameworks do not necessarily explain behaviors surrounding goods initially purchased with the intention to resell to others, such as researching predicted resale value during pre-acquisition, using controversial methods to obtain products during acquisition, and taking special measure to keep a product in pristine condition. While the resale market has expanded due to internet and social media, resale behavior has not drawn much attention from researchers. To address this gap, the author took a qualitative approach to gain an understanding of value perception and behaviors when consumers purchase goods with the intention to resell. The three research questions are: 1) What factors into mixed-role reseller sneakerheads’ perception of a sneaker’s value? 2) What behaviors are exhibited by mixed-role reseller sneakerheads during pre-acquisition, acquisition, physical possession, and resale of the sneakers they intend to resell; what motivates these behaviors? 3) What do mixed-role reseller sneakerheads like and dislike about the sneaker resale market? A total of 25 in-depth interviews were conducted using a semi-structured interview guide. Interviewees were recruited through posts on sneakerhead community websites and snowball sampling. To qualify for participation in the study, interviewees needed to fit the description of a sneakerhead and a mixed-role reseller of sneakers. Results show how the interviewees evaluate the value of sneakers they intend to resell, what behaviors interviewees exhibit during the pre-acquisition, acquisition, physical possession, and disposition stages pertaining to sneakers they intend to resell, and how the interviewees felt about the resale market in general. First, data show that sneakers can hold monetary, emotional, functional, and/or social value. Most discussion about sneaker value centered on monetary value. Findings show that interviewees’ perceptions of monetary value were influenced by sneaker model rarity, celebrity endorsement of sneakers, collaboration between brands and celebrities, retro marketing, and sneaker condition. Second, the interviewees who purchased sneakers with resale intention demonstrated behaviors that are noteworthy in various stages of the Inventory Ownership Cycle (IOC) (Boyd & McConocha, 1996). When interviewees considered purchasing sneakers they intended to resale, they did an extensive information search prior to purchase to predict resale price, purchased multiple pairs with controversial methods (e.g., using bots and back-dooring), did not wear or carefully wore the sneakers, utilized various resale channel (e.g., eBay, social media, and mobile applications), and took measures to minimize physical and financial risks of reselling. Third, data show that while interviewees often had both positive and negative affects towards the resale market, they tended to have more negative affects towards resellers who used controversial methods to acquire sneakers. However, the interviewees seemed to accept these negative aspects of the resale market and said nothing can be done to change it. This study has implications for both researchers and business practitioners. For researchers in consumer behavior, this study provides insight into how resale intention can influence behaviors throughout the IOC (Boyd & McConocha, 1996). For business practitioners, findings from this study call attention to the need to consider consumers who purchase for personal use and consumers who purchase for resale as different market segments. It also calls out the need for brand managers to preserve this unique consumer culture and reduce negative outcomes caused by reselling

Real-Time QoS Monitoring and Anomaly Detection on Microservice-based Applications in Cloud-Edge Infrastructure

Ph. D. Thesis.Microservices have emerged as a new approach for developing and deploying cloud applications that require higher levels of agility, scale, and reliability. A microservicebased cloud application architecture advocates decomposition of monolithic application components into independent software components called \microservices". As the independent microservices can be developed, deployed, and updated independently of each other, it leads to complex run-time performance monitoring and management challenges. The deployment environment for microservices in multi-cloud environments is very complex as there are numerous components running in heterogeneous environments (VM/container) and communicating frequently with each other using REST-based/REST-less APIs. In some cases, multiple components can also be executed inside a VM/container making any failure or anomaly detection very complicated. It is necessary to monitor the performance variation of all the service components to detect any reason for failure. Microservice and container architecture allows to design loose-coupled services and run them in a lightweight runtime environment for more e cient scaling. Thus, containerbased microservice deployment is now the standard model for hosting cloud applications across industries. Despite the strongest scalability characteristic of this model which opens the doors for further optimizations in both application structure and performance, such characteristic adds an additional level of complexity to monitoring application performance. Performance monitoring system can lead to severe application outages if it is not able to successfully and quickly detecting failures and localizing their causes. Machine learning-based techniques have been applied to detect anomalies in microservice-based cloud-based applications. The existing research works used di erent tracking algorithms to search the root cause if anomaly observed behaviour. However, linking the observed failures of an application with their root causes by the use of these techniques is still an open research problem. Osmotic computing is a new IoT application programming paradigm that's driven by the signi cant increase in resource capacity/capability at the network edge, along with support for data transfer protocols that enable such resources to interact more seamlessly with cloud-based services. Much of the di culty in Quality of Service (QoS) and performance monitoring of IoT applications in an osmotic computing environment is due to the massive scale and heterogeneity (IoT + edge + cloud) of computing environments. To handle monitoring and anomaly detection of microservices in cloud and edge datacenters, this thesis presents multilateral research towards monitoring and anomaly detection on microservice-based applications performance in cloud-edge infrastructure. The key contributions of this thesis are as following: • It introduces a novel system, Multi-microservices Multi-virtualization Multicloud monitoring (M3 ) that provides a holistic approach to monitor the performance of microservice-based application stacks deployed across multiple cloud data centers. • A framework forMonitoring, Anomaly Detection and Localization System (MADLS) which utilizes a simpli ed approach that depends on commonly available metrics o ering a simpli ed deployment environment for the developer. • Developing a uni ed monitoring model for cloud-edge that provides an IoT application administrator with detailed QoS information related to microservices deployed across cloud and edge datacenters.Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia Cultural Bureau in London, government of Saudi Arabi