Search results for "Private information retrieval"
showing 10 items of 17 documents
Private information alone can trigger trapping of ant colonies in local feeding optima.
2015
Ant colonies are famous for using trail pheromones to make collective decisions. Trail pheromone systems are characterised by positive feedback, which results in rapid collective decision making. However, in an iconic experiment, ants were shown to become 'trapped' in exploiting a poor food source, if it was discovered earlier. This has conventionally been explained by the established pheromone trail becoming too strong for new trails to compete. However, many social insects have a well-developed memory, and private information often overrules conflicting social information. Thus, route memory could also explain this collective 'trapping' effect. Here, we disentangled the effects of social …
Use of waggle dance information in honey bees is linked to gene expression in the antennae, but not in the brain.
2021
AbstractCommunication is essential for social animals, but deciding how to utilize information provided by conspecifics is a complex process that depends on environmental and intrinsic factors. Honey bees use a unique form of communication, the waggle dance, to inform nestmates about the location of food sources. However, as in many other animals, experienced individuals often ignore this social information and prefer to rely on prior experiences, i.e. private information. The neurosensory factors that drive the decision to use social information are not yet understood. Here we test whether the decision to use social dance information or private information is linked to gene expression diff…
Octopamine and dopamine mediate waggle dance following and information use in honeybees.
2020
Honeybees can be directed to profitable food sources by following waggle dances performed by other bees. Followers can often choose between using this social information or relying on memories about food sources they have visited in the past, so-called private information. While the circumstances that favour the use of either social or private information have received considerable attention, still little is known about the neurophysiological basis of information use. We hypothesized that octopamine and dopamine, two biogenic amines with important functions in reward signalling and learning, affect dance use in honeybees. We orally administered octopamine and dopamine when bees collected fo…
Moderated Redactable Blockchains: A Definitional Framework with an Efficient Construct
2020
Blockchain is a multiparty protocol to reach agreement on the order of events, and to record them consistently and immutably without centralized trust. In some cases, however, the blockchain can benefit from some controlled mutability. Examples include removing private information or unlawful content, and correcting protocol vulnerabilities which would otherwise require a hard fork. Two approaches to control the mutability are: moderation, where one or more designated administrators can use their private keys to approve a redaction, and voting, where miners can vote to endorse a suggested redaction. In this paper, we first present several attacks against existing redactable blockchain solut…
Security and Privacy in Wireless IoT
2018
The 13 articles in this special section focus on security and privacy in wireless Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is a paradigm that involves networked physical objects with embedded technologies to collect, communicate, sense, and interact with the external environment through wireless or wired connections. With rapid advancements in IoT technology, the number of IoT devices is expected to surpass 50 billion by 2020, which has also drawn the attention of attackers who seek to exploit the merits of this new technology for their own benefits. There are many potential security and privacy threats to IoT, such as attacks against IoT systems and unauthorized access to private information of end u…
Managing the flow of private information on children and parents in poverty situations : Creating a panoptic eye in interorganizational networks?
2018
In this article, we discuss how the flow of private information about children and families in poverty situations is managed in interorganizational networks that aim to combat child poverty. Although practices for sharing information and documentation between child and family social work services are highly encouraged and recommended to create supportive features for parents and children, this development often results in undesirable forms of governmentality. Interorganizational networking also creates controlling side effects because the exchange of information in networks of child and family services may wield a holistic power over families. We theorize this issue by using the Foucauldian…
The welfare cost of unpriced heterogeneity in insurance markets
2016
We consider the welfare loss of unpriced heterogeneity in insurance markets, which results when private information or regulatory constraints prevent insurance companies to set premiums reflecting expected costs. We propose a methodology which uses survey data to measure this welfare loss. After identifying some “types” which determine expected risk and insurance demand, we derive the key factors defining the demand and cost functions in each market induced by these unobservable types. These are used to quantify the efficiency costs of unpriced heterogeneity. We apply our methods to the US Long-Term Care and Medigap insurance markets, where we find that unpriced heterogeneity causes substan…
On the social value of publicly disclosed information and environmental regulation
2018
Abstract This paper presents an analysis of environmental policy in imperfectly competitive market with publicly disclosed and privately-held information about costs. We examine the potential asymmetry-reducing role of disclosure and its impact on setting environmental taxes. From a policy perspective, our findings show that disclosure with verifiable reports, is a valuable public good, provides greater transparency in the market, and is generally efficiency enhancing. Results suggest that access to publicly disclosed information enables the fine-tuning of the tax rules towards specific environmental circumstances and improves the ability of the regulator to levy firm-specific environmental…
Entry and espionage with noisy signals
2014
Abstract We analyze the effect of industrial espionage on entry deterrence. We consider a monopoly incumbent who may expand capacity to deter entry, and a potential entrant who owns an Intelligence System. The Intelligence System (IS) generates a noisy signal based on the incumbentʼs actions. The potential entrant uses this signal to decide whether or not to enter the market. The incumbent may signal-jam to manipulate the likelihood of the noisy signals and hence affect the entrantʼs decisions. If the precision of the IS is commonly known, the incumbent benefits from his rivalʼs espionage. Actually, he benefits more the higher is the precision of the IS while the spying entrant is worse off…
Optimal lending contracts
2016
This paper deals with financial contracting between a lender and a borrower with a project to finance. The borrower is protected by limited liability. We consider that the revenue from the project is observable and verifiable but its distribution is influenced by both the borrower’s choice of action and the project’s quality, which are private information. We find that debt contracts are endogenously optimal, as under moral hazard alone. Moreover, while moral hazard leads to credit rationing for the lowest-quality projects only, adding adverse selection creates a bang-bang result: either all projects or none are credit rationed.