We develop an economic model of “greenwash,” in which a firm strategically discloses environmental information and a non-governmental organization (NGO) may audit and penalize the firm for engaging in greenwash. We identify conditions under which NGO punishment of greenwash backfires, inducing the firm to become less rather than more forthcoming about its environmental performance. We show that...

The data consists of actual generation-side auditing including the distribution of loads, seasonal load profiles, and types of loads as well as an analysis of local development planning of a resort island in the South China Sea. The data has been used to propose an optimal combination of hybrid renewable energy systems that able to mitigate the diesel fuel dependency on the island. The resort i...

Abusive tax shelters implemented through partnerships and S corporations have become increasingly popular amongst tax planners, helping high-income taxpayers to underreport an estimated $91 billion of income annually in the US alone. The most challenging problems for tax collection agencies in this respect are a) the recent upswing in large, tiered partnership structures and b) the evolving nat...

Cloud computing is a novel computing model that enables convenient and on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. Auditing services are highly essential to make sure that the data is correctly hosted in the cloud. In this paper, we investigate the active adversary attacks in three auditing mechanisms for shared data in the cloud, including two identity privacy-preser...

This paper examines the economic consequences of tightening auditing standards. We recognize that both auditors’ incentives and expertise are relevant for audit effectiveness. On one hand, tighter auditing standards counter the misbehavior of rogue auditors. On the other hand, tighter standards restrict auditors’exercise of professional judgement, leads to auditors’compliance mentality, and red...

Two high-level abstraction networks for the knowledge content of a terminology, known respectively as the "area taxonomy" and "p-area taxonomy," have previously been defined. Both are derived automatically from partitions of the terminology's concepts. An important application of these networks is in auditing, where a number of systematic regimens have been formulated utilizing them. In particu...

Cloud storage introduces many challenges due to the security and integrity threats toward user’s outsourced data. Many auditing protocols have been proposed, but the majority of them could only serve in single cloud environment. This paper proposes an efficient auditing protocol, which supports batch auditing for multiple data files in multi-cloud environment. By utilizing the bilinear map, the...

While expensive cryptographically verifiable computation aims at defeating malicious agents, many civil purposes of outsourced computation tolerate a weaker notion of security, i.e., “lazy-but-honest” contractors. Targeting this type of agents, we develop optimal contracts for outsourcing of computational tasks via appropriate use of rewards, punishments, auditing rate, and “redundancy”. Our co...