Information, incentives, and commitment : an empirical analysis of contracts between government and state enterprises

The authors analyze experience with written performance contracts between developing country governments and the managers of their state-owned enterprises. Such contracts have been a vogue since the mid-1980s, and substantial resources have been sunk into their design and enforcement, yet the few assessments to date show mixed results. Using a simple agency model, they identify how problems of weak incentives sthemming from information asymmetry, lack of government commitment, and lack of managerial commitment can lead to shirking. They apply the model to a sample of 12 contracts with monopoly enterprises in six developing countries (Ghana, India, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, and Senegal). All suffer from serious contracting problems. They find no pattern of improved performance that can be attributed to the contracts. Only three of the 12 case-study companies showed a turnaround in total factor productivity after contracts were introduced, six continued past trends, and three performed substantially worse under contracts than they had before. Labor productivity improved at a faster pace in four cases, and deteriorated in none, but the improvement predated the contract. Performance contracting assumes that government's objectives can be maximized, and performance improved, by setting targets that take into account the constraints placed on managers. For this to occur, the principals must be willing to explicitly state their objectives, assign to them priorities and weights, translate them into performance improvement targets, provide incentives to meet those targets (or monitor the agents without incurring significant costs), and credibly signal their commitment to the contract. These conditions failed to materialize. Why would governments adopt contracts to which they were notcommitted or that were politically unrealistic? Sometimes because it enabled themto get foreign assistance. How explain the managers'lack of commitment? Not surprisingly, managers with information advantages and bargaining power, and with no strong incentives or commitment from the government, used their advantages to manipulate the targets so as to ensure that their performance would be judged satisfactory. The authors outline the conditions under which performance contracts might succeed in improving performance.Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Health Economics&Finance,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Banks&Banking Reform,Knowledge Economy,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance,Education for the Knowledge Economy

Representing intelligent decision making in discrete event simulation : a stochastic neural network approach

The problem of representing decision making behaviour in discrete event simulation was investigated. Of particular interest was modelling variety in the decisions, where different people might make different decisions even where the same circumstances hold. An initial investigation of existing and alternative approaches for representing decision making was carried out. This led to the suggestion of using a neural network to represent the decision making behaviour in the form of a multi-criteria probability distribution based on data of observed decision making. The feasibility of the stochastic neural network approach was investigated. Models were fitted using artificial data from discrete and continuous distributions that included the shape parameters as inputs, and tested against known results from the distributions. Also a bank simulation was used to collect data from volunteers who controlled the queuing decisions of customers inside the bank. Models of their behaviour were created and implemented in the bank simulation to automate the decision making of customers. The investigation established the feasibility of the approach, although it indicated the need for substantial amounts of data showing examples of decision making. A hybrid model that combined the stochastic neural network approach with a rule-based approach allowed the development of more general models of decision making behaviour

Multicast resource management for next generation mobile communication systems

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Federated Secure Data Sharing by Edge-Cloud Computing Model*

Data sharing by cloud computing enjoys benefits in management, access control, and scalability. However, it suffers from certain drawbacks, such as high latency of downloading data, non-unified data access control management, and no user data privacy. Edge computing provides the feasibility to overcome the drawbacks mentioned above. Therefore, providing a security framework for edge computing becomes a prime focus for researchers. This work introduces a new key-aggregate cryptosystem for edge-cloud-based data sharing integrating cloud storage services. The proposed protocol secures data and provides anonymous authentication across multiple cloud platforms, key management flexibility for user data privacy, and revocability. Performance assessment in feasibility and usability paves satisfactory results. Therefore, this work directs a new horizon to detailed new edge-computing-based data sharing services based on the proposed protocol for low latency, secure unified access control, and user data privacy in the modern edge enabled reality

Queueing Network Modeling Patterns for Reliable and Unreliable Publish/Subscribe Protocols

International audienceMobile Internet of Things (IoT) applications are typically deployed on resource-constrained devices with intermittent network connectivity. To support the deployment of such applications, the Publish/Subscribe (pub/sub) interaction paradigm is often employed, as it decouples mobile peers in time and space. Furthermore, pub/sub middleware protocols and APIs consider the Things' hardware limitations and support the development of effective applications by providing Quality of Service (QoS) features. These features aim to enable developers to tune an application by switching different levels of response times and delivery success rates. However, the profusion of pub/sub middleware protocols coupled with intermittent network connectivity result in non-trivial application tuning. In this paper, we model the performance of middleware protocols found in IoT, which are classified within the pub/sub interaction paradigm-both reliable and unreliable underlying network layers are considered. We model reliable and unreliable protocols, by considering QoS semantics for data validity, buffer capacities as well as the intermittent availability of peers. Finally, we perform statistical analysis by varying these QoS semantics, demonstrating their significant effect on the rate of successful interactions. We showcase the application of our analysis in concrete scenarios relating to Traffic Information Management systems, that integrate both reliable and unreliable participants. The consequent PerfMP performance modeling pattern may be tailored for a variety of deployments, in order to control fine-grained QoS policies

Privatising Network Industries

privatization, regulation, competition, telecoms, electricity, gas, water, rail