How to Rationally Select Your Delegatee in PoS

This paper centers around a simple yet crucial question for everyday users: How should one choose their delegated validators within proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols, particularly in the context of Ethereum 2.0? This has been a long-overlooked gap, as existing studies have primarily focused on inter-committee (validator set) behaviors and activities, while neglecting the dynamic formation of committees, especially for individual stakeholders seeking reliable validators. Our study bridges this gap by diving into the delegation process (normal users delegate their small-value tokens to delegatees who later act as validators) before entering an actual consensus phase. We propose a Bayesian model to quantify normal users' trust in delegatees, which we further incorporate into a game-theoretical model to simulate users' reactions against a set of critical factors identified through extensive research (including 10+ staking service provider as well as 30+ PoS blockchains). Our results reveal that users tend to choose their delegatees and utilize their tokens by carefully weighing the delegation cost, the behaviors of other users, and the reputation of delegatees, ultimately reaching a Nash equilibrium. Unfortunately, the collective trend significantly increases the likelihood of token concentration on a small number of delegatees

Time is money: life cycle rational inertia and delegation of investment management : [Version November 2013]

We investigate the theoretical impact of including two empirically-grounded insights in a dynamic life cycle portfolio choice model. The first is to recognize that, when managing their own financial wealth, investors incur opportunity costs in terms of current and future human capital accumulation, particularly if human capital is acquired via learning by doing. The second is that we incorporate age-varying efficiency patterns in financial decisionmaking. Both enhancements produce inactivity in portfolio adjustment patterns consistent with empirical evidence. We also analyze individuals’ optimal choice between self-managing their wealth versus delegating the task to a financial advisor. Delegation proves most valuable to the young and the old. Our calibrated model quantifies welfare gains from including investment time and money costs, as well as delegation, in a life cycle setting

Essays on dynamic contracts : allocation of ambiguity and delegation

My dissertation studies the design of contracts in different contexts. It contains two theoretical investigations about contracting under ambiguity: in the context of research partnerships and venture capital financing; and an experimental study to examine delegation of decision rights within organizations. The first chapter studies contract design for innovation under ambiguity. Outsourcing of research is a large and growing trend in knowledge-intensive industries such as the biotechnology and software industries. I model innovation as an ambiguous stochastic process and assume that the commercial firms and research labs differ in their attitude towards ambiguity. I characterize the optimal sequence of short-term contracts and examine how the features of this contract facilitate ambiguity sharing: the dynamic moral hazard problem is mitigated under ambiguity; experimentation stops earlier than is socially optimal; the project may be liquidated even after being granted a patent. I find that redesigning the patent law can not implement the Policymaker’s desired optimum. The second chapter analyzes venture capital investment under ambiguity. A central feature of venture capital financing is the extensive use of control rights as an instrument. In this chapter, I present a model of venture capital financing where investment is allowed to depend on an intermediate ambiguous signal. I show how the presence of ambiguity explains the allocation of control rights if the investor is more ambiguity averse than the entrepreneur. In the third chapter, I discuss how delegation of decision rights can be used as a signal of trust that can be reciprocated by cooperation. First, I theoretically show that in a principal-agent framework, using delegation as a signal is the only Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium that survives forward induction criterion. Then I use experimental methods to test this theoretical prediction. I find that the players do not use delegation very often, thus the forward induction logic is not supported by the observed data. However, once the players are given information about the past sessions, they choose the forward induction equilibrium more often. This suggests that information affects the formation of beliefs and equilibrium selection in Bayesian games.Economic

A Shibboleth-protected privilege management infrastructure for e-science education

Simplifying access to and usage of large scale compute resources via the grid is of critical importance to encourage the uptake of e-research. Security is one aspect that needs to be made as simple as possible for end users. The ESP-Grid and DyVOSE projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow are investigating security technologies which will make the end-user experience of using the grid easier and more secure. In this paper, we outline how simplified (from the user experience) authentication and authorization of users are achieved through single usernames and passwords at users' home institutions. This infrastructure, which will be applied in the second year of the grid computing module part of the advanced MSc in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, combines grid portal technology, the Internet2 Shibboleth Federated Access Control infrastructure, and the PERMS role-based access control technology. Through this infrastructure inter-institutional teaching can be supported where secure access to federated resources is made possible between sites. A key aspect of the work we describe here is the ability to support dynamic delegation of authority whereby local/remote administrators are able to dynamically assign meaningful privileges to remote/local users respectively in a trusted manner thus allowing for the dynamic establishment of virtual organizations with fine grained security at their heart

The C Object System: Using C as a High-Level Object-Oriented Language

The C Object System (Cos) is a small C library which implements high-level concepts available in Clos, Objc and other object-oriented programming languages: uniform object model (class, meta-class and property-metaclass), generic functions, multi-methods, delegation, properties, exceptions, contracts and closures. Cos relies on the programmable capabilities of the C programming language to extend its syntax and to implement the aforementioned concepts as first-class objects. Cos aims at satisfying several general principles like simplicity, extensibility, reusability, efficiency and portability which are rarely met in a single programming language. Its design is tuned to provide efficient and portable implementation of message multi-dispatch and message multi-forwarding which are the heart of code extensibility and reusability. With COS features in hand, software should become as flexible and extensible as with scripting languages and as efficient and portable as expected with C programming. Likewise, Cos concepts should significantly simplify adaptive and aspect-oriented programming as well as distributed and service-oriented computingComment: 18