The day-today operations of corporations and government agencies rely on inter-operating legacy, COTs, databases, clients, servers, etc., which are brought together into a distributed environment running middleware (e.g., CORBA, JINI, DCOM, etc.). Both access control and security assurance within these distributed applications is paramount. Of particular concern is the delegation of authority, ...

One reason workflow systems have been criticized as being inflexible is that they lack support for delegation. This paper shows how delegation can be introduced in a workflow system by extending the role-based access control (RBAC) model. The current RBAC model is a security mechanism to implement access control in organizations by allowing users to be assigned to roles and privileges to be ass...

Obligation policies are one main means of exercising control within an organisation. They specify the actions that some subject has to perform. The authority over these actions needs to be specified in authorisation policies. Current policy notations provide us with the needed structure to represent authorisations and obligations as policy objects for distributed systems management. They suppor...

Bureaucracy is featured by vertical hierarchical structure in which the decision maker usually lacks direct access to the informed agent, and the span of discretionary authority decreases top down. In this paper we investigate the delegation scheme in three-level hierarchies. The minister delegates authority to a biased senior bureaucrat, then the senior can make further delegation decision to ...

In a market in which a vertically integrated producer (VIP) supplies an essential input to a retail rival, we explore the role of managerial delegation when it shapes downstream firms’ incentives and determine the endogenous choice of delegation under both Cournot and Bertrand competition. The equilibrium choice of acting as a managerial firm, which is a standard result in literature of strateg...