Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Frontiers in Trust Management

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are becoming increasingly important in the way we organize our lives, our workplaces and our societies. ICT allows people and organisations, that have never interacted with each other in the past, to initiate new and mutually beneficial businesses across the world. This means that personal and business information is increasingly being communicated across interpersonal, inter-business and international borders. Keeping this information safe and protecting the fragile IT infrastructure from criminals is a growing problem in most societies. Unfortunately, traditional security technologies based on a strong perimeter defence work poorly in an inter-connected world that obeys Metcalfe’s law which states that “the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system”, i.e., where there is a strong incentive for interactions across the different borders. During the past decade, trust management has emerged as a promising solution to many challenges in networks and distributed systems as well as emerging problems in computer security and privacy. This special issue on “Frontiers in Trust Management” attempts to highlight some of the latest re- search addressing those challenges. It collects a series of papers on trust management issues that extends papers and ideas presented at the Fifth IFIP WG 11.11 International Conference on Trust Management or one of the affiliated workshops in Copenhagen, June 27 – July 1, 2011

The Impact of Service Distinction on Durable Competitive Advantage: An Investigation in Private Hospital Outpatient Units During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled hospitals to sustain their competitive edge in delivering healthcare services, with service differentiation being a key factor in maintaining this advantage. This research aims to evaluate how service differentiation impacts a hospital\u27s ability to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research, conducted in 2020, is a quantitative descriptive study involving 204 outpatients at Aisyiyah Bojonegoro Hospital. The survey was carried out online using Google Forms and achieved a response rate of 31.2%. The data were analyzed using linear regression. The findings indicate that service differentiation positively influences sustainable competitive advantage (p = 0.00). According to the study, during the COVID-19 pandemic, patients tend to prefer hospitals that offer distinct services