Market Segmentation and Software Security: Pricing Patching Rights
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The patching approach to security in the software industry has been less effective than desired. One critical issue with the status quo is that the endowment of “patching rights” (the ability for a user to choose whether security updates are applied) lacks the incentive structure to induce better security-related decisions. However, producers can differentiate their products based on the provision of patching rights. By characterizing the price for these rights, the optimal discount provided to those who relinquish rights and have their systems automatically updated in a timely manner, and the consumption and protection strategies taken by users in equilibrium as they strategically interact because of the security externality associated with product vulnerabilities, it is shown that the optimal pricing of these rights can segment the market in a manner that leads to both greater security and greater profitability. This policy greatly reduces unpatched populations and has a relative hike in profitability that is increasing in the extent to which patches are bundled together. Social welfare may decrease when automated patching costs are small because strategic pricing contracts usage in the market and also incentivizes loss-inefficient choices. However, welfare benefits when the policy either (1) greatly expands automatic updating in cases in which it is minimally observed or (2) significantly reduces the patching process burden of those who most value the software. This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it