Given n agents each of which has a secret (a fact not known to anybody else), the classical version of the gossip problem is to achieve shared knowledge of all secrets in a minimal number of phone calls. There exist protocols achieving shared knowledge in 2(n−2) calls: when the protocol terminates everybody knows all the secrets. We generalize that problem and focus on higher-order shared knowl...

The paper challenges the prevalent paradigm that differentiates between the management of a core competence and commodity processes. A case study is conducted to examine the strategic planning and management of a call center to illustrate that a commodity process, such as handling customers’ complaints and enquiries, can be transformed into a core competence, if a clear strategic intent is arti...

It has been observed that often the release of a limited part of an information resource poses no security risks, but the relase of a sufficiently large part of that resource might pose such risks. This problem of controlled disclosure of sensitive information is an example of what is known as the aggregation problem. In this paper we argue that it should be possible to articulate specific secr...

Three high-power studies (N = 3,000 total) demonstrated that asking participants to recall an experience as a manipulation can have unintended consequences. Participants who recalled preoccupying secrets made more extreme judgments of an external environment, supporting the notion that secrecy is burdensome. This influence was found, however, only among a subset of participants (i.e., participa...

The present work examined whether secrets are experienced as physical burdens, thereby influencing perception and action. Four studies examined the behavior of people who harbored important secrets, such as secrets concerning infidelity and sexual orientation. People who recalled, were preoccupied with, or suppressed an important secret estimated hills to be steeper, perceived distances to be f...

A relation between two secrets, known in the literature as nondeducibility, was originally introduced by Sutherland. We extend it to a relation between sets of secrets that we call independence. This paper proposes a formal logical system for the independence relation, proves the completeness of the system with respect to a semantics of secrets, and shows that all axioms of the system are logic...

We study logical principles connecting two relations: independence, which is known as nondeducibility in the study of information flow, and functional dependence. Two different epistemic interpretations for these relations are discussed: semantics of secrets and probabilistic semantics. A logical system sound and complete with respect to both of these semantics is introduced and is shown to be ...