University of Hertfordshire
Research Specialism Coursework
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Course Code : 7COM1084 2022
The paper that I have selected for this specialization report is “An Incentive Mechanism for
Managing Obligation Delegation”
Introduction
Delegation is the authority provided to managers to assign responsibility to others in workplace.
It is transfer of obligation but not the rights of the obligation. The person who is making the
delegation is called as delegator and the person who is receiving the delegation is called the
delegate. Delegation transfers the responsibility and authority for performing a particular duty to
another person or a party. A policy based approach is being used in the modern information
system to manage sensitive information (Dugger 2021). Obligation is most important to specify
the security control in using a particular control (Pretschner.A 2006). To avoid violation of
obligation it is necessary to fix a deadline for the fulfillment of the obligation. Sometimes agents
may violate their obligation that might be due to various reasons which lead to the system fault
finally like dysfunctioning or insufficient authorization to access the resource (Irwin.K,
Assigning responsibility for failed obligation 2008). So it is necessary to first identify the clear
responsibilities of the agent who are being involved in the obligation when the obligations are
delegated to one or more agents. Delegation of obligation is considered as a means of providing
opportunity for obligations. But the opportunity provided is wasted if the person or the agent
who received the delegation does not fulfill the obligation eventually. To motivate the person or
agent to complete the delegation received a mechanism of providing credit is being introduced
which will be used to increase the trust score of the particular person or agent if he completes the
obligation.
Open Research Question
There are various reasons behind the delegation of an obligation. A user might be assigned few
obligations which should be completed before a certain deadline. But due to some other work
commitments the user might have obligated the work to another person who is a similar
competence with less constraint. The delegation of obligation mostly focus on the operational
semantic of the delegation and monitoring whether the delegated obligation is fulfilled. It is also
necessary to identify the responsibilities of the person involved in the obligation (Ben-Ghorbel-
Talbi.M 2011). When allowing the occurrence of delegation there is an opportunity that the
delegator’s assigned with the obligation might discharge from their duty. There is no clear idea
about why delegated obligation should be fulfilled by the delegate for the purpose of other unless
there is any benefit for them. It a delegate does not fulfill the delegation all the complexities in
managing the delegation will also become unnecessary. So it is necessary to provide some
incentives for the delegates for completing their delegated obligation. It is necessary to identify
how the incentivize delegates so that they will discharge their delegated obligation to their best is
not investigated completely. The focus is currently based on identifying the methods of incentive
that can be provided for the delegate. Some of the schemes are proposed based on trust
computation method using the Beta distribution to compute the trust score of the user which will
reflect when the delegates fulfill their obligations. What are the various possible ways that can be
used by the delegator and delegate for updating the trust score when a delegated obligation is
fulfilled or violated? A credit rewarding scheme for the delegate for fulfilling the obligations and
the reward can be determined based on the trust score of the delegate. A delegator should pay
credits to the delegate for completing the delegated obligation with the effort required this type
of scheme will sometimes avoid situations where users are mostly seeking some delegate to
assign their obligations to others. A set of eligibility criteria is required to be defined when
delegated obligation arises for delegatee based on which they can bid the obligation. There are
also various risk factors involved in selecting a delegate whether the delegatee will complete the
delegated obligation. An incentive mechanism based on the cascaded delegation of obligation is
also being identified. The various incentive methods that are identified to promote the fulfillment
of the obligations by the delegatee should be evaluated based on which the incentive mechanism
that best encourage the delegatee to complete the obligation can be promoted. In this paper the
authors have run an simulated experiments based on multi-agent system and evaluated the model
and the results showed that the incentive mechanism will promote the delegatee to complete the
obligations.
Existing and related work
The main aim of this paper is to identify the best method to distribute the incentive for the
delegatee for completing the obligation. Statistical distributions like Normal distribution, LogNormal, Gamma and Beta distributions are used in determining the ability of distribution in
various fields of studies. Beta distribution is a model with 6 parameter (D.W.W.Ng 2018) and it
can also be used in the evaluation of the prediction level of a model. Here the authors have used
the Beta distribution on two parameters and expressed the probability density function which is
defined in terms of factorial function when α and β are positive integers. The interval range [0,1]
is used in the standard beta distribution for the current model there are one two outcomes one is
success and the other is failure. Beta distribution is a conjugate prior to the binomial likelihood
of the posterior likelihood of the Bayesian analysis. After running more experiments can
compute posterior by adding number of success and failure of the various parameters with the
prior distribution. This approach is used to identify the probability of users in fulfilling the
obligations which have only two outcomes completed the obligation or violated the obligation.
The intuition of the beta distribution comes on play when it is looked based on binomial
distribution. The main difference between the binomial difference and the beta distribution is the
number of success rate where beta distribution has more success rate (Kim 2020) so it is selected
for the implementation of the incentive scheme. There are various policy designed for specifying
obligation policies one of the most common approach that is used is the temporal logic that can
capture the time constraints that is associated with the obligations (Chen.L 2012) . An approach
that is similar to the one done by (Irwin.K, On the modeling and analysis of obligations 2006)
where they used a simple data structure to capture the components of the obligation. Assumption
was made on the existence of a clock and its ticks are indexed using natural number. A time
interval, the obligation are defined as a tuple (u,a,i) where u is user, a is the action and i is the
time t and the three states of the obligation are active, satisfied or violated. U represent obligation
is fulfilled, if the obligation is not fulfilled it is represented as violated and active if it is neither
satisfied nor violated. It is necessary to keep the system in a desirable state such that no
obligations are violated. Since the system cannot enforce the user to fulfill the obligation and
sometime some might be violated. The system should monitor the status of the obligation based
on the fulfillment of the obligation reward and blame mechanisms are used in the incentivize.
Research approach
The authors have introduced an incentive scheme based on One Hop Delegation. The approach
that is used to compute the obligation trust is based on the evidence of the user’s performance in
fulfilling the obligations taken in the past. The evidence is based on the sequence of satisfaction
of obligation and violation of the obligation is considered as bad experience of the user. The
experience of the delegatee can be used to estimate whether will satisfy the future obligation
based on the estimated probability. Beta probability density function is used by the authors to
transform the sequence of the values that represent the good and bad experience of the user and
based on the static probability distribution trust on the user’s obligation is decided. History of the
obligation stratification of various events are used based on the values the trust on the obligation
is computed. During some situation the user need to delegate the assigned obligation to some
other user so that the obligation made by the user will not be discharged but it might be violated.
A delegation protocol was also introduced by the author which is used to identify whether the
obligation is performed by the user or it is been delegated to some other user in the group. The
protocol is informally defined in this implementation.
The various steps involved in the delegation of an obligation are first a user will start
broadcasting the delegation request to a group the users in the group with similar competence
level in handling the job responsibilities within an organization can respond. On receiving the
delegation announcement the members in the group will wish to bid their eligibility and will
submit the details of the current obligation trust. Then the user will select the one who most
appropriately suit for the assigned obligation and then will send an award message for the
successful completion of the bid and also inform the other users who have participated in the bid
about their unsuccessful. Identification of the best delegatee for the assigned obligation is done
by running the delegation protocol.
The other process involved in this incentivizing scheme is updating the obligation trust. Which is
done by exploring the discharge of delegated obligations by the user? It is not a straight forward
assignment the rewards must be given to individual based on the delegation process that they are
involved and the status of the completed process. A weighting function is introduced by the
author to evaluate two users involved. It provide a good flexibility in designing a number of
possible ways that can be used for updating the users negative and positive obligations for both
the users based on various degrees. Three cases are examined by the authors to identify the best
appropriate incentive scheme that can be used. Then the earning of reward credits is done based
on the case study discussed in updating the obligation trust of the users in fulfilling the delegated
obligation. It is necessary to identify that a user who fulfills the obligation trust and will to accept
a new obligation is discharging from his duty within a deadline. Based on which the obligation
trust should be decided. The authors also taken the idea of Principal-Agent model of
(Holmstorm.B 1991) in proposing the incentive mechanism that is based on the trust of
obligation of the users. If a user is assigning a delegated obligation to someone else then he has
to pay delegatee some reward credit that is associated with the obligation and if other user is
putting some effort in completing the obligation of another user then some credit associated with
the obligation should be given to him. The basic idea behind this is to provide credit for those
users who have high obligation trust and more credits. Three types or delegators are also
identified based on the risk preference they are risk-averse delegator, risk-seeking delegator and
risk average delegators. Then the eligibility of the delegates is introduced based on the credit
reward. Even if a user is having high credit but having more active obligation and the deadline of
the obligation get clashed then those kinds of users can be excluded. So new mechanism is
introduced by the author for scheduling the each user based on the assigned obligation. A
restricted window size is also introduced where the number of obligation that can be performed
by a user is limited. Cascading of delegation of obligation is also done as a delegation chain.
Personal investment
More research is under modeling based on managing obligation. Incentive mechanism is one of
the most useful mechanisms that make the user to fulfill their obligations. A study is done about
various methods the explore the interaction of authorization and obligation. The problem of
maintain the accountability of the obligation and the need of dependency and the privileges of
resources to fulfill the obligation are studied by (Pontual.M 2019). Assumption is made about the
action of the obligation in order to focus on the incentive scheme that he obligation are not
subject to access control and assumed that they will be fulfilled. A model can be designed based
on the accountability problem as a single framework. It helps to motivate the users to fulfil the
obligation. Delegation obligation was considered as a recurring phenomenon by (Schaad.A
2002) as per their model if a user delegates an object assigned to him to another user then the
delegating user will loses its assignment to the obligation and will create a new obligation and
assigned to the user. It does not provide any incentive and monitoring schemes. Various schemes
of providing incentives for the delegation of obligations can be identified and can reduce the
violation of obligations by the user. Security implication on delegating an obligation can also be
analyzed and provide proper authorization mechanism in accessing the delegation of obligation.
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