Background activities on smartphones are essential to today’s “always-on” mobile device experience. Yet, there lacks a clear understanding of the cooperative behaviors among background activities as well as a quantification of the consequences. In this paper, we present the first in-depth study of app collusion, in which one app surreptitiously launches others in the background without user’s a...

We demonstrate the use of linear programming techniques in the analysis of mechanism design problems. We use these techniques to analyze the extent to which a …rst-price auction is robust to collusion when, contrary to some prior literature on collusion at …rst-price auctions, the cartel cannot prevent its members from bidding at the auction. In this case, cartels have been shown to be less pro...

An identity-based proxy re-encryption scheme allows the semi-trusted proxy to convert ciphertexts encrypted under Alice’s public identity into the ciphertexts encrypted under Bob’s public identity. The proxy cannot learn any information of the underlying message. As in other delegation schemes, identity-based proxy re-encryption scheme should be secure against collusion, especially of the proxy...

We experimentally study bidder collusion in open ascending auctions for multiple objects. The project is based on the theoretical results by Brusco and Lopomo (1999), who give theoretical support for the following claims: (1) simultaneous ascending bid auctions can be vulnerable to collusion in the multi-object case; (2) The sole presence of complementarities does not hinder collusion; (3) Coll...

This paper considers non-economic factors involved in the occurrence and sustainability of collusion. Group development among executives of incumbent firms created during the evolution of an industry can stimulate collusion, even in the uncertain introduction stage of a new industry. Certain social conditions and social characteristics of executives related to the industry characteristics of en...

The present paper studies repeated Bertrand oligopoly with multiple markets. The markets are subject to independent, stochastic fluctuations in demands. According to the literature, the demand fluctuations generally hinder collusion, while the multimarket contact sometimes facilitates it. We show that when only partial collusion is sustainable under a single market, the per-market expected prof...

Economists have by large ignored the phenomena of office politics, such as collusion and favoritism, which prevail in organizations where, due to the subjectivity of performance assessments, the incentive mechanism often takes a form of tournament. This paper studies these phenomena in a stylized tournament model. It finds that favoritism cannot benefit organizations when employees are unable t...

We use a principal-agent framework to compare two types of organisational structures, centralisation and delegation. Moreover, we do so in a framework that allows for collusive possibilities among the agents. Under a centralised structure the principal directly contracts with all agents, whereas under delegation the principal contracts with only a few of the agents, giving them the right to ent...

Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) algorithms attempt to reduce the injuries to privacy caused by malicious parties during the rule mining process. Usually, these algorithms are designed for the semi-honest model, where participants do not deviate from the protocol. However, in the real-world, malicious parties may attempt to obtain the secret values of other parties by probing attacks or co...

We study the effect of horizontal mergers in a dynamic model with noisy collusion. At each instant firms either privately choose output levels or merge to create a monopoly. In equilibrium, merging trades off the benefits of avoiding price wars against costs of merging, net of higher profits due to lower competition. There are three results. First, mergers are optimal when collusion fails (i.e....