Adversarial behaviours knowledge area

The technological advancements witnessed by our society in recent decades have brought improvements in our quality of life, but they have also created a number of opportunities for attackers to cause harm. Before the Internet revolution, most crime and malicious activity generally required a victim and a perpetrator to come into physical contact, and this limited the reach that malicious parties had. Technology has removed the need for physical contact to perform many types of crime, and now attackers can reach victims anywhere in the world, as long as they are connected to the Internet. This has revolutionised the characteristics of crime and warfare, allowing operations that would not have been possible before. In this document, we provide an overview of the malicious operations that are happening on the Internet today. We first provide a taxonomy of malicious activities based on the attacker’s motivations and capabilities, and then move on to the technological and human elements that adversaries require to run a successful operation. We then discuss a number of frameworks that have been proposed to model malicious operations. Since adversarial behaviours are not a purely technical topic, we draw from research in a number of fields (computer science, criminology, war studies). While doing this, we discuss how these frameworks can be used by researchers and practitioners to develop effective mitigations against malicious online operations.Published versio

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INSURANCE MARKET CONCENTRATION AND HEALTHCARE USE AND QUALITY: AN EXPLORATION OF THE ROLE OF MARKET DYNAMICS, PATIENT DEMAND, AND PHYSICIAN INCENTIVES.

Insurance markets in the United States are highly concentrated, which has ambiguous policy implications. Concentrated insurers negotiate lower payment rates with healthcare providers, but may not pass savings on to consumers via lower premiums. Given this ambiguity, this dissertation explores the relationship between insurance market concentration and two important outcomes, healthcare utilization and quality. In Paper 1, I estimate longitudinal models predicting changes in inpatient utilization as a function of changes in insurer, hospital, and physician concentration. I estimate separate models for a set of highly acute, price-insensitive services and a set of more discretionary services for which demand should be more responsive to changes in price. I find that insurer concentration increases inpatient utilization, driven by more discretionary services, consistent with movement down the demand curve as concentrated insurers negotiate lower prices. The clinical benefit of this higher utilization is unclear, as I do not detect an effect on the likelihood of unplanned readmission. In Paper 2, I use inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment to compare the effect of insurer concentration on imaging utilization between the patients of orthopedists, neurologists, and urologists who own their own imaging equipment and patients of those specialist physicians who do not own imaging equipment and have a weaker financial incentive to order imaging. I find that the effect of insurer concentration is significantly larger among the patients of orthopedist owners compared to the patients of orthopedist non-owners, with no significant differences across the patients of neurologists or urologists. This suggests that supply-side financial incentives to provide more care contribute to the positive relationship between insurer concentration and utilization. In Paper 3, I estimate longitudinal models predicting changes in hospital patients’ experience of care as a function of changes in insurer and hospital concentration. I find that insurer concentration improves, while hospital concentration worsens, patient experience. These results suggest that insurer concentration leads to higher levels of healthcare utilization, driven by both patient demand and the physician’s financial incentive to provide more care. The effect on quality is mixed, with insurer concentration improving hospital patients’ experience of care, but not significantly decreasing the likelihood of readmission

通信自由化後の情報通信市場における消費者保護 - タンザニアの事例

早大学位記番号:新7775早稲田大

Grading the States: A Report on America's Health Care System for Adults With Serious Mental Illness

Measures each state's progress in providing evidence-based, cost-effective, recovery-oriented services for adults with serious mental illnesses. Assesses public mental health nationwide and makes policy recommendations, including better data collection

Net Neutrality

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Chris Marsden maneuvers through the hype articulated by Netwrok Neutrality advocates and opponents. He offers a clear-headed analysis of the high stakes in this debate about the Internet's future, and fearlessly refutes the misinformation and misconceptions that about' Professor Rob Freiden, Penn State University Net Neutrality is a very heated and contested policy principle regarding access for content providers to the Internet end-user, and potential discrimination in that access where the end-user's ISP (or another ISP) blocks that access in part or whole. The suggestion has been that the problem can be resolved by either introducing greater competition, or closely policing conditions for vertically integrated service, such as VOIP. However, that is not the whole story, and ISPs as a whole have incentives to discriminate between content for matters such as network management of spam, to secure and maintain customer experience at current levels, and for economic benefit from new Quality of Service standards. This includes offering a ‘priority lane' on the network for premium content types such as video and voice service. The author considers market developments and policy responses in Europe and the United States, draws conclusions and proposes regulatory recommendations

The Promise and Perils of Algorithmic Lenders’ Use of Big Data

Tens of millions of Americans lack access to traditional forms of credit and must rely on payday and pawn loans instead. “Algorithmic lending 2.0” promises to enable fintech companies to lend to those excluded from traditional forms of credit. Version 2.0 algorithmic lenders claim to use Big Data and machine learning to increase credit access by making better predictions about prospective borrowers’ creditworthiness and decreasing the cost of credit. Supporters also claim that algorithmic lending 2.0 removes human bias from the financial services sector. Detractors have cast doubt on both claims, arguing that there is scant evidence that algorithmic lending 2.0 expands credit access in non-predatory ways or that substituting algorithms for loan officers reduces discrimination. This Article evaluates the existing regulatory framework to determine if regulation can support the promise of algorithmic lending 2.0 without imperiling the vulnerable

Cross-border Mobility for Electric Vehicles: Selected results from one of the first cross-border field tests in Europe

This book provides selected results from the accompanying research of the project CROME. The vision of the project was to create and test a safe, seamless, user-friendly and reliable mobility with electric vehicles between France and Germany as a prefiguration of a pan-European electric mobility system. Major aims were contributions to the European standardisation process of charging infrastructure for electric mobility and corresponding services, and to provide an early customer feedback

Net Neutrality

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Chris Marsden maneuvers through the hype articulated by Netwrok Neutrality advocates and opponents. He offers a clear-headed analysis of the high stakes in this debate about the Internet's future, and fearlessly refutes the misinformation and misconceptions that about' Professor Rob Freiden, Penn State University Net Neutrality is a very heated and contested policy principle regarding access for content providers to the Internet end-user, and potential discrimination in that access where the end-user's ISP (or another ISP) blocks that access in part or whole. The suggestion has been that the problem can be resolved by either introducing greater competition, or closely policing conditions for vertically integrated service, such as VOIP. However, that is not the whole story, and ISPs as a whole have incentives to discriminate between content for matters such as network management of spam, to secure and maintain customer experience at current levels, and for economic benefit from new Quality of Service standards. This includes offering a ‘priority lane' on the network for premium content types such as video and voice service. The author considers market developments and policy responses in Europe and the United States, draws conclusions and proposes regulatory recommendations