This chapter presents a clustered peer-to-peer system as a resource organization structure for web-service hosting platforms. Where service quality, such as response time and service availability, are provided with assurance. The peer-to-peer organization allows integration of autonomous resources into a single platform in a scalable manner. In clustered peer-to-peer systems, nodes are organized into clusters based on some proximity metric, and a distributed hash table overlay is created among the clusters. This organization enables lightweight techniques for load balancing among different clusters, which is found to be essential for providing response time guarantees. Service availability is provided by replicating a service instance in multiple nodes in a cluster. A decentralized load balancing technique called diffusive load balancing is presented in the context of clustered peer-to-peer systems and evaluated for effectiveness and performance.
Ali Bagherzandi, Stanisław Jarecki, Nitesh Saxena, Yanbin Lu
We revisit the problem of protecting user’s private data against adversarial compromise of user’s device(s) which would normally store this data. We formalize an attractive solution to this problem as PasswordProtected Secret-Sharing (PPSS), which is a protocol that allows a user to secret-share her data among n trustees in such a way that (1) the user can retrieve the shared secret upon entering a correct password into a reconstruction protocol which succeeds as long as at least t+ 1 honest trustees participate, and (2) the shared data remains secret even against the adversary which corrupts at most t servers, with the level of protection expected of passwordauthentication, i.e. the probability that the adversary learns anything useful about the secret is at most negligibly greater than q/|D| where q is the number of reconstruction protocol instances in which adversary engages and |D| is the size of the dictionary from which the password was randomly chosen. We propose an efficient PPSS protocol in the public key model, i.e. where the device can remember a trusted public key, provably secure under the DDH assumption, using non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs which are efficiently instantiatable in the Random Oracle Model (ROM). The resulting protocol is robust and practical, with fewer than 4t + 12 exponentiations per party, and with only three messages exchanged between the user and each server, implying a single round of interaction in the on-line phase. As a side benefit our PPSS protocol yields a new Threshold Password Authenticated Key Exchange (T-PAKE) protocol in the public key model which is significantly faster than existing T-PAKE’s provably secure in the public key model in ROM.
Government spending on health has grown as a percent of GDP over the last 40 years in industrialized countries. Widespread decentralization of healthcare systems has often accompanied this increase in spending. In this paper, we explore the effect of soft budget constraints on subnational health spending in a sample of OECD countries. We find countries where subnational governments rely primarily on central government financing and enjoy large borrowing autonomy have higher healthcare spending than those with more restrictions on subnational government borrowing.
This essay reviews theoretical arguments concerning the issue of decentralized redistribution. We make a representative examination of what are regarded as the merits and demerits of fiscal decentralization from a redistributive perspective, emphasizing the concepts of social solidarity. We proceed to take a closer look at the decentralization theorem, and argue that the celebrated theorem is not an appropriate framework for the issue of redistribution. We then review other merits as well, and argue that those merits largely concern the cost-efficiency of public service delivery and could be in principle exploited without compromising the principle of horizontal equity, through two forms of administrative decentralization, delegation and de-concentration. However, the local incentive problem still remains. The design of transfers and personnel control mechanism will be a crucial factor to attain the cost-efficiency of local administration.
Multiparty computation protocols have been known for more than twenty years now, but due to their lack of efficiency their use is still limited in real-world applications: the goal of this paper is the design of efficient two and multi party computation protocols aimed to fill the gap between theory and practice. We propose a new protocol to securely evaluate reactive arithmetic circuits, that offers security against an active adversary in the universally composable security framework. Instead of the “do-and-compile” approach (where the parties use zero-knowledge proofs to show that they are following the protocol) our key ingredient is an efficient version of the “cut-and-choose” technique, that allow us to achieve active security for just a (small) constant amount of work more than for passive security.
Decentralization of decision-making on the availability of essential public goods for regional and local level raises questions regardless of ability to ensure or guarantee the supply by the small municipalities. It affects the delicate problem of fiscal decentralization and own limits of decentralization process. In this paper, we deal with problems concerning primarily the development of small municipalities as independent public corporations, their ability to play the self-government role and to ensure the availability of essential public goods and services. The main criteria for defining small rural communities are the population and the status of municipality in the settlement structure, which is a predetermined by range of services provided at territory of municipality (market services, public services) to its citizens and residents of surrounding villages. We deal with problems of financing small communities, their participation in the distribution of revenue from shared taxes, the availability of other resources. We monitor the factors that enter into models of reallocation of public resources. We base their findings mot only on information from literature, but also from terrain research, which not only confirmed some previously published facts, but allowed to reveal the factors that significantly affect the financial situation of small municipalities. This led to the determination of parameters, the key mechanism for setting the allocation of public resources. On the basis of the investigation, we analyze the parameters, the key mechanism for setting the allocation of public resources. In conclusion, the authors summarize the main issues and articulate the principles that should be respected in the formulation and adjustment of the budget determination.
Open access
Regional Development and Policy
Polish socio-economic development
Hungarian Social, Economic and Educational Studies
Most companies now operate in an environment in which their products, markets, customers, employees, and technology are constantly changing. In such circumstances, the appropriate organizational form becomes important, and a decentralized organization is very common. The essence of decentralization is the freedom managers have at various levels to make decisions within their sphere of responsibility. This frequently involves determining a transfer price system within the company, which has the potential to become the most important and possibly the most interesting problem of management control. Decentralization can simulate market conditions within a company between autonomously acting subunits--i.e., they reflect competition. Managers in such subunits or have different degrees of autonomy and a range of company decisions for which they are responsible. The cost center manager is typically responsible for costs, the profit center manager for costs and revenues, and the investment center manager for generating an adequate return on investment. Because of the decentralization of decision making, the role of performance measurement and performance assessment within these responsibility centers becomes important. These issues lead to discussion and systematic analysis of transfer price functions between segments. (1) Companies often use transfer prices as substitutes for market prices either because market prices do not exist or because they do not facilitate internal trading and the synergies it creates. Even if synergies exist for internal trade, it is possible that market prices may not encourage this to happen. Thus top management often imposes a transfer price in order to benefit from these synergies. An added complication, however, is that sharing the synergistic benefits between responsibility centers is arbitrary, so the correct transfer price cannot exist. It is obvious that transfer prices affect the profit reported in each responsibility center, and, more importantly, companies can use transfer pricing to influence decision making. We will look at the functions and different types of transfer prices and their possible behavioral consequences. The analysis, which is from a managerial point of view, argues that neither a single true nor a fair price exists, but, rather, the transfer price is conditional on the decision context. Our article also highlights possible dysfunctional behavior. We outline some examples and propose possible solutions that we assess in the light of behavioral effects, highlighting how complex, difficult, and insolvable the issue of transfer pricing is in reality. In order to understand the effects resulting from asymmetric information and finding suitable transfer prices, we will first discuss the functions of transfer prices. Functions of Transfer Prices The decentralized organization is a connection of partly independent business units. An important task for management is the performance measurement and assessment of these units. This requires, for example, that the reported profit figure for, say, profit or investment centers for the relevant period, should be reliable and trustworthy. Where these business units trade with each other, the transfer pricing system has the potential to distort reported profit performance. Therefore, the internal profit-allocation function and related performance measurement of business units are crucial elements of transfer pricing. Transfer prices should also influence managerial decision making because they should provide an incentive to maximize the business units' profit targets. We refer to this as the coordination function. If managerial decisions lead to maximized profits within all the autonomous business units, then this should also maximize the total company or, in the following group, profits, ignoring tax and foreign exchange considerations. Business unit managers' decisions then are identical to the decisions that the group's top managers would make if they had all the necessary information. …
Well known for its centralized local economic system under the national equity principle, Japan has experimented with transforming this regional redistribution system into a new local economic system of governance for more autonomous local economic growth over the past decade. This new local economic governance has been characterized by the increasing involvement of social actors, such as large private corporations and local communities, in policy processes.This dissertation reveals that new local economic growth strategies for the new local economic governance have operated under very different models in different regions of Japan, although all new local programs have been introduced under the banner of public-private partnership. New partnership programs in the local economic policy arena in the 2000s have moved toward the market model, in which local authorities pursue growth by attracting international business resources, in the major metropolitan areas around Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, whereas they have moved toward the community model, in which local authorities purge growth by mobilizing local organizational resources, in the rest of Japan. The market model is embedded in market reform for deregulation that makes large private corporations' freer activities easy, whereas the community model is an attempt to strengthen the structure of endogenous networks among local authorities and local economic and social elites.This dissertation highlights two variables to explain regional variations of local economic growth strategies: dual local economic structures and diverging politico-economic coalitions. First, under the rule of Koizumi Junichiro, a coalition of promoting market reform among neoliberal politicians and large private corporations has won politically over a coalition for maintaining national equity among politicians embedded in traditional conservative center-local linkages, local business groups, and local leadership of underdeveloped areas, in national politics. The regional redistribution mechanism stopped functioning in this political choice. Instead, market reform and local community participation have been introduced as alternatives to regional redistribution mechanisms. Second, the major metropolitan areas and other underdeveloped areas, which came to stand on equal conditions for autonomous local economic growth strategies under decentralization reforms, are characterized by different situations in attracting private investment. The competitive regions of the major metropolitan areas have taken the market model as their main local economic growth strategy because they are competitive to attract private investment. In contrast, the protected regions outside the major metropolitan areas have taken the community model as their key local economic growth strategy because they have less competitive local economic structure of fading industries and scare population for attracting private investment.Over the past decade, reforms for public-private partnership in the local economic policy arena resulted in the disturbance of the Japanese way of balancing market powers and local interests in the postwar period. In the postwar period, the centralized regional redistribution mechanism, led by national politicians and central bureaucracies, functioned as a tool for social integration with consideration for national equity. However, experiments with the new form of local economic governance were not successful in balancing market reform with local community mobilization. The mobilization of local community resources could not match the political role of the regional redistribution mechanism outside the major metropolitan areas. In addition, market reform, which has been more effective in the advanced major metropolitan areas, has produced increasing regional economic disparity. Japan has faced a complicated stand-off between large private corporations detached from specific localities and local communities locked in place, which were connected by national political coordination mechanisms in the postwar period. Although each of two diverging local economic growth strategies has been effective in different regions, there was no national political mechanism for mediating local variations of these localized programs in the 2000s.
A trusted small world Peer-to-Peer (P2P) model with role and reputation based access control policies (SW-R2P) was designed to combine the network topology and trust evaluation in P2P network.The model utilizes the zero knowledge interactive proof (ZKIP) scheme to authenticate the group information between peers without transferring any related data.The group information is used to cluster the peers to construct a small world topology.The Bayesian trust network is involved into the SW-R2P model to evaluate the multi-faceted trust of the peer and the group,which supporting the action protocols of peers and the long links between groups.Simulation shows that the SW-R2P model performs much better than the Chord and R2P models in the resources lookup,clustering coefficient and peer reputation error.The SW-R2P model integrates the advantages of small world topology,ZKIP scheme and Bayesian trust network,therefore implements a trustworthy,secure and efficient P2P network.
The author explores distinctiveness of the regional state mostly in Spain as third model of territorial organization. Unlike unitary and federal, regional state is not wide-spread and broad accepted concept of vertical organization although modern Spain and Italy represents examples of good practice. Having in mind diversity of regional identities and strong cultural distinctiveness in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and other areas, author is wondering if any other model of territorial organization could be sustainable in such socio-cultural environment. After the period of Franco?s dictatorship, which had been trying to exterminate cultural and historical particularities among Spanish nations, decentralization demands have become more stronger resulting with the new constitution adopted in 1978. This act has set the corner-stone of modern Spanish democracy based on Autonomous Communities as specific forms of decentralized state and territorial autonomy.
Goldwasser, Micali, and Rackoff [GMR] define for us what it means for a theorem to have a "zero-knowledge proof. " In brief, a zero-knowledge proof is an interactive probabilistic protocol that gives highly convincing (but not absolutely certain) evidence that a theorem is true and that the prover knows a proof (a "standard " proof in a given logical system), while providing not a single additional bit of information about the proof. GMR formalize this idea. We do not. Nevertheless, we hope that the reader who has not read their paper will still understand our proofs. Goldreich, Micali, and Wigderson [GMW] take another leap forward. They show that if one makes a reasonable assumption (that one-way functions1 exist), then it is possible to convert any standard constructive proof of any of the the-orems in a large natural class of theorems2 into a zero-knowledge proof that the theorem is true. GMW start by considering a particular NP-complete problem: Graph 3-Colorability. Instance. A graph G. Question. Can G be "properly " 3-colored (each node colored by one of 3 given colors so that no two adjacent nodes receive the same color). GMW show that a "prover " who knows how to 3-color a particular graph G can convince a verifier that (1) G is 3-colorable, and (2) the prover knows a 3-coloring, without giving away any additional information. In particular, the prover does not give away the slightest clue how to 3-color G. Supported, in part, by National Science Foundation Grant DCR 85-13926. ^ne-wayïunctions are 1-1 functionsTrom n-Rt integers to n-bitTintegers tEaT^inlBrmäUyp are easy to compute in the forward direction, but hard to invert on all but a small fraction of ra-bit integers. 2These theorems, which arise frequently in mathematics and computer science, are the yes-instances of decision problems IT in NP. A good reference to NP and the theory of NP-
Vipul Goyal, Yuval Ishai, Mohammad Mahmoody, Amit Sahai
Motivated by the question of basing cryptographic protocols on stateless tamper-proof hardware tokens, we revisit the question of unconditional two-prover zero-knowledge proofs for NP. We show that such protocols exist in the interactive PCP model of Kalai and Raz (ICALP ’08), where one of the provers is replaced by a PCP oracle. This strengthens the feasibility result of Ben-Or, Goldwasser, Kilian, and Wigderson (STOC ’88) which requires two stateful provers. In contrast to previous zero-knowledge PCPs of Kilian, Petrank, and Tardos (STOC ’97), in our protocol both the prover and the PCP oracle are efficient given an NP witness. Our main technical tool is a new primitive that we call interactive locking, an efficient realization of an unconditionally secure commitment scheme in the interactive PCP model. We implement interactive locking by adapting previous constructions of interactive hashing protocols to our setting, and also provide a direct construction which uses a minimal amount of interaction and improves over our interactive hashing based constructions. Finally, we apply the above results towards showing the feasibility of basing unconditional cryptography on stateless tamper-proof hardware tokens, and obtain the following results: