Adopting Competitive Strategies in the Telecommunications Industry

The landscape of the Ghanaian Telecommunication industry has seen dramatic changes in the last two decades. During these period new companies both local and foreign emerged some as start-ups others through mergers or acquisitions. The liberalized economic environment lead to the influx of operators hence the need to assess their performance and the effectiveness of competitive strategies adopted.  This paper will evaluate the strategies adopted by mobile telecommunication operators to gain competitive advantage in the industry with particular reference to the Ghanaian market. Our study revealed that to have a competitive advantage and improve on performance a sustain investments in the area of infrastructure, human capital, technology, sales and marketing activities and essential resources were critical. Keywords: Telecommunications industry, Customer targets, Strategic management, competitive advantag

PRIVACY PRESERVATION FOR TRANSACTION INITIATORS: STRONGER KEY IMAGE RING SIGNATURE AND SMART CONTRACT-BASED FRAMEWORK

Recently, blockchain technology has garnered support. However, an attenuating factor to its global adoption in certain use cases is privacy-preservation owing to its inherent transparency. A widely explored cryptographic option to address this challenge has been ring signature which aside its privacy guarantee must be double spending resistant. In this paper, we identify and prove a catastrophic flaw for double-spending attack in a Lightweight Ring Signature scheme and proceed to construct a new, fortified commitment scheme using the signer’s entire private key. Subsequently, we compute a stronger key image to yield a double-spending-resistant signature scheme solidly backed by formal proof. Inherent in our solution is a novel, zero-knowledge-based, secured and cost-effective smart contract for public key aggregation. We test our solution on a private blockchain as well as Kovan testnet along with performance analysis attesting to efficiency and usability and make the code publicly available on GitHub

Development and Validation of Work Place Integrity Scale; Evidence from Ghana.

This article developed and validated work place integrity scale that are applicable across industries. Responded questionnaire perceived to contribute to integrity were subjected to principal components analysis. Overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.843 was reported. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value was 0.887, whiles the Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached statistical significance, supporting the use of factor analysis. Total variance explained initially, revealed the presence of six components with eigenvalues 24.973%, 8.309%, 5.045%, 4.843%, 4.077%, 3.969% of the variance respectively contributing to a cumulative variance of 51.2%. Using Cattell’s scree test, it was decided to retain components 1&2 for further investigation. To aid in the interpretation of these two components, oblimin rotation was performed which resulted in a simple pattern matrix with 2 components showing a number of strong loadings. The resulted component correlation matrix was very strong (0.346). The two-component solution explained a total of 33.2% of the variance, with Component 1 contributing 24.9% and Component 2 contributing 8.3%. The resulted pattern matrix relating to component 1 supports the non- usage of inducement to assess the integrity of a person, whiles component 2 support the use of inducement to assess the integrity of a person. Key Words: Integrity; Reliability test; Validation test; Cronbach’s alpha; Bartlett’s test of sphericity, Oblimin rotation