Secret Sharing for Cloud Data Security

Cloud computing helps reduce costs, increase business agility and deploy solutions with a high return on investment for many types of applications. However, data security is of premium importance to many users and often restrains their adoption of cloud technologies. Various approaches, i.e., data encryption, anonymization, replication and verification, help enforce different facets of data security. Secret sharing is a particularly interesting cryptographic technique. Its most advanced variants indeed simultaneously enforce data privacy, availability and integrity, while allowing computation on encrypted data. The aim of this paper is thus to wholly survey secret sharing schemes with respect to data security, data access and costs in the pay-as-you-go paradigm

What drives contract design in strategic alliances? Taking stock and how to proceed

We collect and assess prior empirical evidence on contract design in alliances that has been published since Parkhe’s (1993) seminal study on inter-firm contracts. We elaborate on the effects of transaction-related factors, experience gained from prior relationships, and deliberate learning efforts on contracts. Our paper offers three contributions. First, we systematically review the existing literature on alliance contracts and summarize our findings. Second, while prior research has traditionally focused on contractual complexity, we place the content of contracts center stage and identify three contractual functions. While existing studies on contractual functions predominantly refer to safeguarding as a response to appropriation concerns, we also consider coordination and contingency adaptability as outcomes of adaptation concerns. Third, we disentangle the differential influences of previous experiences on distinct contractual functions and show that experience gained from prior relationships has different effects on safeguarding and contingency adaptability than on coordination. Overall, we add to the systematization of the current debate on alliance contract design and trace promising avenues for future research on the impact of transaction- and experience-related factors on the complexity and content of alliance contracts

FM contract relationships: from mobilisation to sustainable partnership

Purpose / theory Outsourcing is a fundamental business model for the Facilities Management (FM) industry. To enable sustained mutual success the parties involved must seek to understand the unique, socially constructed, and often highly complex situational realities of the organisational ecologies they are engaged in. The FM industry can unlock improved performance and strategic credibility through an appreciation of the need for different conversations. Design / methodology / approach Findings from two recent cases are considered. Data from two different client-contractor relationship situations was collected utilising a critical ethnographic research methodology; a phenomenological paradigm that acknowledges knowledge as socially constructed through language. A variant on Scott-Morgan‟s unwritten-rules coding method was used to analyse the data and justify the prevalent themes and issues presented. Findings Findings include the role of perceptions and assertions in the construction of social realities, change management implications, and how these impact on the traditional view of the client/contractor relationship. Ethnographic findings are typically context specific, therefore generalisations must be carefully considered. The key findings are however substantiated by existing FM outsourcing literature. Originality / value Highlights the practical importance of seeking to understand socially embedded realities for improved FM contract performance. Considers the human resource element of change via FM outsourcing. Takes a social constructivist approach to organisational sense-making. Uses examples from focused, critical ethnographies to explore existing FM contracting dynamics. Qualitative investigations into related organisational circumstances are encouraged to further develop an evidence base

IWS Issue Brief - Where in the World Is Your Job Going?

Let\u27s say you have a job processing credit card receipts, answering calls to a customer hotline, reading X-rays, or writing software code. Then one day the boss announces the facility is closing and you, along with all your co-workers, will be laid off. Shortly after, you learn from a news report in the local paper that workers in India are now performing the tasks that used to be handled in your office. In the article the company explained its decision to “offshore” jobs by noting the sizeable gap between the wages earned by its former employees in America and those earned by workers in that far away country

Complementarity Among Vertical Integration Decisions: Evidence from Automobile Product Development

This paper examines complementarity among vertical integration decisions in automobile product development. Though most research assumes that contracting choices are independent of each other, contracting complementarity arises when the returns to a single vertical integration decision are increasing in the level of vertical integration associated with other contracting choices. First, effective coordination may depend on the level of (non-contractible) effort on the part of each agent; contracting complementarity results if coordination efforts are interdependent and vertical integration facilitates a higher level of non-contractible effort. Second, effective coordination may require the disclosure of proprietary trade secrets, and the potential for expropriation by external suppliers may induce complementarity among vertical integration choices. We provide evidence for complementarity in product development contracting by taking advantage of a detailed dataset that includes the level of vertical integration and the contracting environment for individual automobile systems in the luxury automobile segment. Using an instrumental variables framework that distinguishes complementarity from unobserved firm-level factors, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that contracting complementarity is an important driver of vertical integration choices. The findings suggest that contracting complementarity may be particularly important when coordination is important to achieve but difficult to monitor.

Decisions under Uncertainty in Decentralized Online Markets: Empirical Studies of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Outsourcing

Recent developments in information technologies, especially Web 2.0 technologies, have radically transformed many markets through disintermediation and decentralization. Lower barriers of entry in these markets enable small firms and individuals to engage in transactions that were otherwise impossible. Yet, the issues of informational asymmetry that plague traditional markets still arise, only to be exacerbated by the "virtual" nature of these marketplaces. The three essays of my dissertation empirically examine how participants, many of whom are entrepreneurs, tackle the issue of asymmetric information to derive benefits from trade in two different contexts. In Essay 1, I investigate the role of online social networks in mitigating information asymmetry in an online peer-to-peer lending market, and find that the relational dimensions of these networks are especially effective for this purpose. In Essay 2, I exploit a natural experiment in the same marketplace to study the effect of shared geographical ties on investor decisions, and find that "home bias" is not only robust but also has an interesting interaction pattern with rational decision criteria. In Essay 3, I study how the emergence of new contract forms, enabled by new monitoring technologies, changes the effectiveness of traditional signals that affect a buyers' choice of sellers in online outsourcing. Using a matched-sample approach, I show that the effectiveness of online ratings and certifications differs under pay-for-time contracts versus pay-for-deliverable contracts. In all, the three essays of my dissertation present new empirical evidence of how agents leverage various network ties, signals and incentives to facilitate transactions in decentralized online markets, form transactional ties, and reap the benefits enabled by the transformative power of information technologies

From the Theory of the Firm to FDI and Internalisation: A Survey

This paper surveys recent contributions on the Internalisation issue, based on different theories of the firm, to show how the make-or-buy decision, at an international level, has been assessed through the opening up of the “black box” - traditionally explored by the theorists of the firm – and the simultaneous endogenization of the market environment – as in the International Economics tradition. In particular, we consider three Archetypes – Grossman-Hart-Moore treatment of hold-up and contractual incompleteness, Holmstrom-Milgrom view of the firm as an incentive system, Aghion-Tirole conceptualisation of formal and real authority in organisations – and show how they have been embedded in industry and general equilibrium models of FDI to explain the boundaries of global firms.FDI, Internalisation, International Economics, Incomplete contracts

A secure data outsourcing scheme based on Asmuth – Bloom secret sharing

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Data outsourcing is an emerging paradigm for data management in which a database is provided as a service by third-party service providers. One of the major benefits of offering database as a service is to provide organisations, which are unable to purchase expensive hardware and software to host their databases, with efficient data storage accessible online at a cheap rate. Despite that, several issues of data confidentiality, integrity, availability and efficient indexing of users’ queries at the server side have to be addressed in the data outsourcing paradigm. Service providers have to guarantee that their clients’ data are secured against internal (insider) and external attacks. This paper briefly analyses the existing indexing schemes in data outsourcing and highlights their advantages and disadvantages. Then, this paper proposes a secure data outsourcing scheme based on Asmuth–Bloom secret sharing which tries to address the issues in data outsourcing such as data confidentiality, availability and order preservation for efficient indexing