Understanding the Role of Incentives in Security Behavior

A key challenge for researchers has been to affect change in user security behavior in organizations. Several theories from different domains have been used for understanding and changing user security behavior including deterrence, fear appeals, and education; however, the success of these approaches has been low. In this research we examine the role of financial incentives in changing user behavior; we specifically provide incentives to users for good security practices. The study attempts to switch user behavior such that they adopt good security habits however it recognizes the limitations of extrinsic rewards in being temporary and couples the extrinsic rewards to affect intrinsic motivation through use of nudges. The field study shows positive results however the number of subjects in our study was small (24). Our goal is to extend the study by large scale data collection to further validate our results

Law for the Common Man: An Individual-Level Theory of Values, Expanded Rationality, and the Law

This article makes an admittedly bold attempt at outlining an analytical framework for addressing this question. Instead of looking at the legal implications of bounded rationality -- an exercise highly worthy in its own right -- this article advances a theory of expanded rationality. This theory retains the element of rationality in that people respond to incentives in an attempt to attain utility, and it does not question the observation that decision-making is often bounded due to various factors

What You Don’t Know Can’t Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision Making

This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives. While virtually all recent empirical work has relied on administrative- or employer-reported data, we document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are five times more responsive to pension incentives than the average. In contrast, ill-informed individuals respond to their own misperceptions of the incentives rather than being unresponsive to any measured incentives.pension plans, retirement behavior

Conflict resolution: the missing link between liberal international relations theory and realistic practice

This Handbook is a collection of works from leading scholars in the Conflict Analysis and Resolution (CAR) field, all working from their own disciplines yet cognizant of the multidisciplinary nature of that field. The central theme is the value of interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis and resolution of conflicts. This approach consists of moving from the study of analytical approaches to understanding the deep-rooted causes of conflict to third-party intervention approaches to prevent or end violence and resolve conflict

H-Diplo ISSF round table: Steven Ward. status and the challenge of rising powers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Published versio

Energy Conservation as Security

"Energy security" is usually defined as the guarantee of a stable and reliable supply of energy at reasonable prices. However, this definition is often misleading because it equates oil supply as the primary focus of a country's energy security considerations. As a developing country with a limited natural resource endowment China does not rely on oil alone. Instead China is one of the few economies in the world that still uses coal as one of its main sources of energy. Therefore, energy security in China is more comprehensive because it must consider the supply of coal, gas, electricity and nuclear energy along with oil imports

Firms, Courts, and Reputation Mechanisms: Towards a Positive Theory of Private Ordering

This Essay formulates a positive model that predicts when commercial parties will employ private ordering to enforce their agreements. The typical enforcement mechanism associated with private ordering is the reputation mechanism, in which a merchant community punishes parties in breach of contract by denying them future business. The growing private ordering literature argues that these private enforcement mechanisms can be superior to the traditional, less efficient enforcement measures provided by public courts. However, previous comparisons between public and private contractual enforcement have presented a misleading dichotomy by failing to consider a third enforcement mechanim: the vertically integrated firm. This Essay develops a model that comprehensively addresses three distinct types of enforcement mechanisms--firms, courts, and reputation-based private ordering. The model rests on a synthesis of transaction cost economics, which compares the efficiencies of firms versus markets, and the private ordering literature, which compares the efficiencies of public courts versus private ordering. It hypothesizes that private ordering will arise when agreements present enforcement difficulties, high-powered market incentives are important, and the costs of entry barriers are low. The Essay then conducts an illustrative test by comparing the model\u27s predictions to documented instances of private ordering