Jelena Erić Nielsen, Verica Babić, Vesna Stojanović-Aleksić, Јеlena Nikolić
Research Question: The purpose of this paper is to explore how leadership style and organizational structure characteristics influence employees’ intentions to start their own entrepreneurial ventures, ideas or projects, within an organizational setting. Motivation: The main goal is to learn how to prevent innovativeness declining in a traditional organization and make internal environment friendly for entrepreneurial initiatives and for employees with propensity to develop new ideas, aiming to create sustainable competitive position. Idea: The paper explores how identified leadership variables, initiative, pioneer, proactive behaviour and ability to communicate vision affect employees’ entrepreneurial intentions. We also analyze the organizational structure impact, testing organic design, level of centralization and formalization. For measuring employees’ entrepreneurial intentions, we use a previously validated scale and measurements, innovation, risk propensity and autonomy. Data: The data are collected using a questionnaire on a random sample of 208 respondents employed in nineteen Serbian companies. Tools: A quantitative study methodology was designed and implemented, appropriate statistical methods performed, including correlation and linear regression analyses. Findings: We have found evidence that appropriate leadership style has a positive influence on employees' entrepreneurial intentions. More specifically, there is a positive correlation between the leader’s initiative, pioneer and proactive behaviour, and the employees’ intentions to start innovative entrepreneurial ventures. The employees’ willingness to act autonomously is affected by leader’s initiative and proactive attitude, but also by ability to clearly communicate the vision. The study also reveals that organic organizational structure, decentralization and low formalization have a positive influence on employees' entrepreneurial intentions. Contribution: The study contributes to a significant degree by filling gaps in knowledge base, revealing new perspectives about relevance of both leadership style and organizational structure for encouraging organizational entrepreneurship. The analysis also provides a more fine-grained perspective about characteristics of organizational design and improves understanding of the employees’ actions depending on authority delegation, procedures and overall flexibility of organizational structure. Practical implications represent guidelines for practitioners as to how to set up structure and adjust leadership style in order to foster entrepreneurship among employees.
With the rise of cryptocurrency tokens as a new asset class, the question of the fair evaluation of a cryptocurrency token has become a question of increasing importance. We estimate the pricing kernel with which users price factors affecting their token holdings. We investigate how traditional risk factors such as market risk are evaluated, as well as how blockchain specific risk factors are priced in. In order to do so, we introduce an asset pricing model and modify its properties to make it applicable to cryptocurrency markets. We group the risk factors into market related and Bitcoin- and Ethereum blockchain specific risk factors. We find that blockchain specific risk factors are priced in. There is evidence that risk factors have moved from Bitcoin to Ethereum specific risk factors with an increasing importance of market factors, providing evidence for a decoupling of on-chain and off-chain trading activity.
Oliver James Scholten, Nathan Hughes, Sebastian Deterding, Anders Drachen · 6 authors
Ethereum crypto-games are a booming and relatively unexplored area of the games industry. While there is no consensus definition yet, 'crypto-games' commonly denotes games that store tokens, e.g. in-game items, on a distributed ledger atop a cryptocurrency network. This enables the trading of game items for cryptocurrency, which can then be exchanged for regular currency. Together with their chance-based mechanics, this makes crypto-games part of the recent convergence of digital gaming and gambling. In a first effort to scope the field, this paper surveys popular crypto-games, which use the Ethereum cryptocurrency, to tease out characteristic technical properties and gameplay. It then compares the games' features with criteria found in current legal and psychological definitions of gambling. We find that the popular crypto-games selected meet a combined legal and psychological definition of gambling, and conclude with ramifications for future research.
This paper introduces a new method of Blockchain formation for reliable storage of personal data of ID-card holders. In particular, the model of the information system is presented, the new structure of smart ID-cards and information on these cards are proposed. The new structure of Blockchain, "Blockchain Tree", allows not only to store information from ID-cards but also to increase the level of security and access control to this information. The proposed Subchains system allows us to integrate Blockchain of the lower level to Blockchain of the higher level, allowing us to create a multilevel protected system.
Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
Cybersecurity and Information Systems
Advanced Research in Systems and Signal Processing
The increasing amount of personal data is raising serious issues in the context of privacy, security, and data ownership. Entities whose data are being collected can benefit from mechanisms to manage the parties that can access their data and to audit who has accessed their data. Consent management systems address these issues. We present Consentio, a scalable consent management system based on the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain. The data management challenge we address is to ensure high throughput and low latency of endorsing data access requests and granting or revoking consent. Experimental results show that our system can handle as many as 6,000 access requests per second, allowing it to scale to very large deployments.
Iago Sestrem Ochôa, Luís Augusto Silva, Gabriel de Mello, Bruno Alves da Silva · 8 authors
With the popularization of the Internet-of-Things, various applications have emerged to make life easier. These applications generate a large amount of user data. Analyzing the data obtained from these applications, one can infer personal information about each user. Considering this, it is clear that ensuring privacy in this type of application is essential. To guarantee privacy various solutions exist, one of them is UbiPri middleware. This paper presents a decentralized implementation of UbiPri middleware using the Ethereum blockchain. Smart contracts were used in conjunction with a communication gateway and a distributed storage service to ensure users privacy. The results obtained show that the implementation of this work ensures privacy at different levels, data storage security, and performance regarding scalability in the Internet of Things environments.
Increasing penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) gives rise to the challenges in the secure operation of power systems. The EV charging loads should be distributed among charging stations in a fair and incentive-compatible manner while ensuring that power transmission and transformation facilities are not overloaded. This paper first proposes a charging right (or charging power ration) trading mechanism and model based on blockchain. Considering all kinds of random factors of charging station loads, we use Monte Carlo modeling to determine the charging demand of charging stations in the future. Based on the charging demand of charging stations, a charging station needs to submit the charging demand for a future period. The blockchain first distributes initial charging right in a just manner and ensures the security of facilities. Given that the charging urgency and elasticity differences vary by charging stations, all charging stations then proceed with double auction and peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction of charging right. Bids and offers are cleared via double auctions if bids are higher than offers. The remaining bids and offers are cleared via the P2P market. Then, this paper designs the charging right allocation and trading platform and smart contract based on the Ethernet blockchain to ensure the safety of the distribution network (DN) and the transparency and efficiency of charging right trading. Simulation results based on the Ethereum private blockchain show the fairness and efficiency of the proposed mechanism and the effectiveness of the method and the mechanism.
Marcos Nogueira Ruppelt, André Brum Missaggia, Bruno Miranda dos Santos, Franco da Silveira · 5 authors
O meio de troca, ou “dinheiro”, é à base da civilização, uma ferramenta de negociação entre os homens para que os homens não sejam as ferramentas de negociação. A possibilidade de estar presenciando o surgimento de uma moeda espontaneamente eleita pelo mercado é o grande motivador deste trabalho. É possível que esteja ocorrendo atualmente uma revolução monetária na história da humanidade e isso por si só já se torna objeto de investigação relevante. Diante disso, o trabalho buscou descobrir se o Bitcoin pode ser considerado uma moeda atualmente, levando em consideração a evolução histórica e as bases que formaram sistemas monetários durante a evolução das civilizações. Para realização deste trabalho, optou-se por um estudo qualitativo e exploratório descritivo. Como conclusão foi possível encontrar como resultados o fato de que o aumento da liquidez e aceitação do Bitcoin estão fazendo com que ele se consolide como um meio de troca de fácil acesso, inclusive, tornando-se moeda corrente em alguns países, por essa descentralização e democratização de acesso.
Blockchain is an emerging technology that promises many exciting applications in various fields, including financial, medical, energy, and logistics management. However, there are still some limitations in the existing blockchain framework that prevents its widespread adoption in the commercial world. One important limitation is the storage requirement, wherein each blockchain node has to store a copy of the distributed ledger. Thus, as the number of transactions increases, this storage requirement grows quadratically, eventually limiting the scalability of a blockchain system. Moreover, the public ledger in a blockchain framework allows anyone in the network to audit the transaction, which may not be favourable in some privacy-sensitive applications. In this paper, a secret-sharing scheme is proposed to reduce the size of the blockchain transactions. Each transaction block is divided into t parts, and the size of each part is 1/ t size of transaction block. We use the secret-sharing mechanism to share t parts into n shares. Hence, each node stores not one transaction but one share in the blockchain system. The proposed scheme can eventually reduce the storage cost of a blockchain transaction by 1/ t without introducing an additional recovery communication cost; however, robustness is reduced in node failure as a tradeoff. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme was more efficient and secure compared to other state-of-the-art schemes that aim to reduce blockchain storage for industrial big data.
Rowel Gündlach, Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Remco van der Hofstad, Tommy Koens · 5 authors
Improving transaction throughput is one of the main challenges in decentralized payment systems. Attempts to improve transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies are usually a trade-off between throughput and security or introduce a central component. We propose Hydra, a decentralized protocol that improves transaction throughput without the security trade-off and has no central component. Our novel approach distributes blocks over multiple blockchains. Hydra makes a trade-off between transaction throughput and finality, the time it takes to stabilize the record of a transaction in the blockchain. We rigorously analyze the double spend attack in a multiple-blockchain protocol. Our analysis shows that the number of transactions per second can be increased significantly while finality is within acceptable boundaries.
The biggest advantage of introducing blockchain is that it can deliver data to members while maintaining the security of medical data sensitive to personal privacy. That is, by using a blockchain in the ecosystem of medical information, it is possible to connect the insurer, the health care organization, and the patient. The blockchain provides health data efficiently and increases accuracy and efficiency when changing patient data through the health system. In addition, it improves the efficiency and control of patients' personal health data and increases the price transparency of pharmaceuticals and health services. So far, the healthcare industry has had strict regulations and policies to limit data security and personal privacy. Therefore, this paper has suggested the framework with functions to support clinical decision making more efficiently using blockchain technology and FHIR data standards. Basically, this framework is built on the FHIR, which is designed to be provided to patients. In addition, it complements and uses open key encryption technology and meets the key requirements required in interoperability functions, such as user identification/authentication, secure data exchange, and authorized data. In particular, it provides further secure data exchange method aiming access guarantee, consistent data format and system modularity. These instructions give you guidelines for preparing papers for
This research examines Blockchain and how it can be utilized in higher education. Before exploring how blockchain can be used in higher education, one must understand just how blockchain is formed, how it accumulates information and its attributes both good and bad. To appreciate how blockchain functions, its use in other industries and applications are explored. Based upon blockchain utilization, a discussion of how it can be applied to higher education is explored and discussed.
This research explores Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) applications for digital watermarking performed on the camera in real time, combining this with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to suggest workable systems for data cataloguing and image integrity. Reference implementations of both technologies are developed and evaluated for their effectiveness and suitability for these purposes.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
August Thio-ac, Alfred Keanu Serut, Rayn Louise Torrejos, Keenan Dave Rivo · 5 authors
Electronic systems tend to simplify the tedious traditional scheme and basically focuses on the platform design and process organization. The integrity of the output of an automated system is not left behind but the possibility of internal manipulation is still high. This paper presents the current issues in company procurements and the solution in the form of blockchain technology. Several individuals and professionals were asked to evaluate a blockchain-based procurement system in comparison to the current electronic (e-procurement) system. A blockchain-based system has the capability to hold transactional data with complete decentralization and eliminate the growing number of fraud cases in companies and organizations. This paper mainly focuses on the effectiveness of a blockchain-based system in company procurements.
Статья посвящена исследованию места и особенностей такого нового института в договорном праве России, как смарт-контракт.Исследован зарубежный опыт по этой тематике
Rob Vluggen, Cees J. Gelderman, Janjaap Semeijn, Marc van Pelt
Public agencies feel the need to advance sustainability and use procurement as an instrument to do so. Many studies focused on internal forces, explaining the limited success of sustainable public procurement. This study focused on how external forces are able to hold municipalities accountable for sustainable procurement. Three mid-sized Dutch municipalities were investigated through an extensive document study and 34 semi-structured interviews. The results show minor legal pressure to enforce sustainable procurement. National legislation, guidelines and principles are considered non-binding, due to a lack of penalties in the case of non-compliance. Real pressure stems from lobbying by branch organizations and political pressure initiated by citizens. In contrast with the New Public Management principles, municipalities appear to place more emphasis on legal and financial accountability, in contrast to performance accountability. Accountants mainly focus on legitimacy and the finance department only monitors spending within budget. The hybrid organization of the procurement function seems to impede sustainability development. Only the larger projects are subject to sustainability requirements, set by centralized purchasing departments. Smaller projects, responsible for 2/3 of the total spend are managed by decentralized groups, remaining under the radar of sustainability policies.
Bitcoin has attracted the attention of investors lately due to its significant market capitalization and high volatility. This work considers the modeling and forecasting of daily high and low Bitcoin prices using a fractionally cointegrated vector autoregressive (FCVAR) model. As a flexible framework, FCVAR is able to account for two fundamental patterns of high and low financial prices: their cointegrating relationship and the long memory of their difference (i.e., the range), which is a measure of realized volatility. The analysis comprises the period from January 2012 to February 2018. Empirical findings indicate a significant cointegration relationship between daily high and low Bitcoin prices, which are integrated on an order close to the unity, and the evidence of long memory for the range. Results also indicate that high and low Bitcoin prices are predictable, and the fractionally cointegrated approach appears as a potential forecasting tool forcryptocurrencies market practitioners.
Cryptocurrencies have embraced Twitter as a major channel of communication. Employing social network analysis and sentiment analysis, this study investigates the Twitter-mediated communication behaviors among cryptocurrencies. This study determines whether a significant association exists between cryptocurrencies' Twitter networks and their credit scores. Data were drawn from the Twitter pages of several top cryptocurrencies. The results indicate that reply-mention networks had the densest structure, that the following-follower network structure was correlated with the reply-mention structure, and that the reply-mention and co-tweet networks were positively correlated. The results also indicate that cryptocurrencies' active networking strategies affected their credit scores and more importantly, that cryptocurrencies frequently linked with fellow currencies tended to have high credit scores.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.
The article probes into factors that determine processes of decentralization in managing the general education system. The study entails a review of pertinent literature and an analysis of the distribution of powers among entities managing the general education system based on the European countries' experience. The study concludes that the education management system in the most EU-countries is decentralized or gradually being decentralized and de-concentrated on the basis of the subsidiarity principle. The results of our research give the possibility to affirm that the successful implementation of the decentralization reform requires the following two conditions: political support for proposed changes and the ability of those charged with carrying out the reform. An analysis of literature confirms that decentralization as a process is also a function of factors other than political will and capacity. These factors include trust (the extent of decentralization depends on the central government’s trust in the local government, and vice versa), financial troubles, path dances, international developments, etc. An analysis of the distribution of decision making powers in areas of financing and human resources demonstrates that there is a trend towards decentralization, albeit inconsistent due to obstacles on the level of centralized management. The article maintains that there has to be an adequate balance between centralization, which is necessary for the implementation of general national educational objectives, and decentralization, which allows teachers, schoolchildren, parents and the representatives of local communities to participate in education management.
Federated learning, as a promising machine learning approach, has emerged to leverage a distributed personalized dataset from a number of nodes, e.g., mobile devices, to improve performance while simultaneously providing privacy preservation for mobile users. In the federated learning, training data is widely distributed and maintained on the mobile devices as workers. A central aggregator updates a global model by collecting local updates from mobile devices using their local training data to train the global model in each iteration. However, unreliable data may be uploaded by the mobile devices (i.e., workers), leading to frauds in tasks of federated learning. The workers may perform unreliable updates intentionally, e.g., the data poisoning attack, or unintentionally, e.g., low-quality data caused by energy constraints or high-speed mobility. Therefore, finding out trusted and reliable workers in federated learning tasks becomes critical. In this article, the concept of reputation is introduced as a metric. Based on this metric, a reliable worker selection scheme is proposed for federated learning tasks. Consortium blockchain is leveraged as a decentralized approach for achieving efficient reputation management of the workers without repudiation and tampering. By numerical analysis, the proposed approach is demonstrated to improve the reliability of federated learning tasks in mobile networks.
The extreme automation of our factories is necessary in order to face the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This new industrial paradigm will force our industries to manufacture much shorter and customized series at increasingly competitive prices, even tackling the manufacture of thousands of different configurations of a single base product. In order to achieve this, our production processes must have a flexibility in their configuration that has never been imagined before. This flexibility and ability to adapt automatically to demand are the essence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and are part of the Western strategy to recover an industrial sector increasingly threatened by the Eastern production of large series at really competitive prices. Based on our participation in more than a dozen proofs of concept in the automotive, aeronautics, agri-food, or energy sectors, we describe the scenarios in which blockchain technology brings the greatest benefits to Industry 4.0. After finishing different experimentations, we carried out an in-depth analysis of the true added value of blockchain in the industry and contrasted our conclusions through interviews with more than 20 people in charge of innovation from different industries. As a result, we have obtained the principal four values of blockchain technology applied to Industry 4.0.
Mirko Koscina, David Manset, Claudia Negri-Ribalta, Octavio Pérez Kempner
We propose a new healthcare data exchange platform for research centers, hospitals and healthcare institutions. Our model is based on a federated blockchain network that interconnect the healthcare institutions and orchestrate the data life cycle from the data publication to the data consumption. The blockchain is responsabible to keep the traceability of the whole process and we use a specially designed smart contract to control the data sharing process. Moreover, we provide the means to enforce GDPR and thus achieve a GDPR compliant model.