Search Results (414)

Financial statement fraud inflicts large and recurring losses on capital markets, yet the dominant detection paradigm still relies on single, black-box classifiers (e.g., RUSBoost) trained on structured accounting ratios alone. Two limitations follow: (i) the rich, unstructured Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) narrative of the 10-K filing is discarded, and (ii) the resulting scores are difficult for auditors to trust because they carry no transparent, standards-aligned rationale. Recent large language model (LLM) systems have shown that multi-agent collaboration is more robust than a single LLM for anomaly detection, but no study has systematically transferred this paradigm to listed-company statement fraud. We propose FraudDebate-Agent, a four-role multi-agent system in which a Quantitative Analyst agent scores 28 raw accounting items and 14 ratios with gradient-boosted and tabular attention models, a Narrative Auditor agent quantifies tone, linguistic uncertainty, and year-over-year textual novelty of the MD&A with FinBERT, and an Industry Peer agent uses retrieval-augmented generation to measure industry-relative anomaly. A Critic–Debate agent then orchestrates a pair-wise Evidence-based Multi-Agent Debate (EMAD) that reconciles disagreement across modalities and arbitrates a reconciled fraud-risk assessment, which is aggregated over a tri-modal evidence graph. Our contributions are as follows: (1) the first use of an evidence-grounded debate mechanism for accounting fraud, which materially reduces LLM hallucination; (2) a numerical–textual–peer evidence graph that fuses heterogeneous signals; and (3) an explainable report aligned with the PCAOB AS 2401 fraud-risk taxonomy. On AAER-labelled firm-years linked across a SEC financial dataset and EDGAR-CORPUS, FraudDebate-Agent improves the area under the ROC curve and the rare-event ranking metric NDCG@k over the strongest single-modality and single-LLM baselines while producing substantially more faithful explanations. We frame the system as a fraud-risk screening and risk-ranking tool for AAER-labelled misstatement risk rather than a determination of fraudulent intent. We report results over multiple seeds to reflect real-world stochasticity and discuss limitations and cross-domain applications. Full article

The digital transformation of higher education has heightened the need for reliable mechanisms to verify the authenticity, integrity, and independence of academic documents. This study presents the design and practical implementation of a blockchain-based, multifunctional educational document verification system for the higher education environment of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The proposed system is presented by a hybrid multi-layered architecture that integrates a frontend web portal, a C# ASP.NET backend service, a PostgreSQL off-chain database, a Smart Bridge integration subsystem, and an Ethereum-compatible blockchain layer with Solidity smart contracts. The system separates operational educational data from trust-sensitive verification records: student, graduate, catalog, and document metadata are stored off-chain, while selected transcript and diploma-related data are registered on-chain and linked to transaction hashes. The Smart Bridge subsystem enables secure interaction with state information systems via SOAP/XML and digital signatures, improving the reliability of personal data used in academic record processing. The blockchain implementation uses transaction hashes, event logs, BlockScout monitoring, and role-based smart-contract authorization to support traceability and tamper-resistant verification. Experimental implementation showed an average gas consumption of approximately 226,125 gas per transaction. The proposed system demonstrates that blockchain extends existing centralized educational infrastructures by adding a transparent, auditable, and user-accessible trust layer for academic document management and verification. Full article

Geographical indication (GI) products are often understood through terroir, certification, and branding, yet less attention has been paid to the feedback dynamics through which their market value is amplified and destabilized. This paper applies systems thinking to the post-harvest value–trust subsystem of Xinhui Chenpi, a traditional Chinese aged citrus pericarp product with GI protection, to examine how value amplification and systemic vulnerability emerge through interacting feedback mechanisms. Drawing on 28 semi-structured interviews conducted between September 2023 and December 2024, supplemented by participant observation, policy and standard documents, field-based market observations, and contextual media materials, the study develops a preliminary causal loop diagram (CLD) with 15 endogenous feedback variables, 3 boundary value-input variables, 4 exogenous contextual inputs, and 21 causal links (18 endogenous and 3 value-input). The model identifies two reinforcing loops and two balancing loops through which price expectations, holding incentives, credible circulation supply, perceived scarcity, misrepresentation, and trust erosion interact. The trust-erosion loop shows how premium-driven misrepresentation increases claim uncertainty, weakens open-market consumer trust, reduces credible open-market liquidity, and further contracts credible circulation supply. Buyer exit and delayed supply response operate as limited balancing mechanisms because their effects are segment-dependent and constrained by aging and verification delays. The proposed CLD suggests that high-value mechanisms in aging-dependent GI products may also generate structural vulnerabilities, with implications for managing consumer trust, claim verification, and credible circulation in premium markets. Full article

Cyber-physical power systems (CPPSs) are a crucial component of smart grids, integrating physical power systems with advanced information and communication technologies to achieve efficient, reliable, and intelligent energy management and control. However, with the widespread deployment of information technology, CPPSs face increasingly severe security threats and privacy protection challenges, such as data leakage, identity forgery, and impersonation, which can compromise the secure and stable operation of CPPSs. To counter these threats and protect privacy, cryptographic technique is developed to provide fundamental and powerful tools, supporting secure authentication, data integrity checking, privacy preservation, and trusted communication between connected devices in CPPSs. We systematically review the research progress on security authentication and privacy protection in CPPSs from a cryptographic perspective. Our survey analyzes the major security threats faced by CPPSs, along with the impact of various attacks on system data. We explore mainstream cryptographic algorithms, including digital signatures, key agreement protocols, signcryption authentication, homomorphic encryption, and blockchain-based security mechanisms that are capable of resisting cyber attacks and ensuring reliable decision-making and control in CPPSs. This work also provides the trends and challenges regarding the intersection of cryptography and networked control, blockchain scalability, and convergence of cryptography and artificial intelligence in CPPSs. Full article

Vehicle Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) face critical challenges in trust management, privacy preservation, and scalability, particularly with the integration of 5G networks in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Traditional centralized trust models present single points of failure and privacy concerns that compromise network security and user anonymity. This paper presents a novel decentralized trust model leveraging blockchain technology, Interplanetary File System (IPFS) integration, and post-quantum cryptographic algorithms to address these limitations. Our proposed TrustChain-VANET framework implements advanced privacy-preserving encryption techniques including threshold and homomorphic encryption, geographical sharding for scalability, and edge-assisted consensus mechanisms. Performance evaluation demonstrates significant improvements: 40% reduction in authentication latency (90–120 ms vs. 150–300 ms), 90% malicious node detection rate (+15% improvement), 300% increase in transaction throughput (2000–2150 TPS), and 100% scalability enhancement supporting up to 5000 nodes. The system integrates seamlessly with 5G network slicing (URLLC, eMBB, mMTC) while maintaining quantum resistance through CRYSTALS-Dilithium, KYBER, and FALCON algorithms. Real-world deployment considerations including OBU computational constraints, standardization gaps, and energy efficiency are comprehensively analyzed. Results indicate that the proposed decentralized approach provides robust security, enhanced privacy, and improved scalability for next-generation vehicular networks, making it suitable for large-scale ITS deployment. The main contribution of this work is the development of a unified TrustChain-VA 48NET framework. The proposed framework integrates blockchain-based trust management, IPFS-assisted storage, 5G network slicing, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), geographical sharding, and post-quantum cryptographic mechanisms within a single architecture for next-generation VANET environments. While these technologies have been investigated separately in previous studies, this work presents a consolidated framework that analyzes their interoperability, identifies integration challenges, and evaluates their combined impact on trust management, scalability, privacy preservation, and deployment feasibility in Intelligent Transportation Systems. Full article

Non-cooperative and manipulative behaviors are strategic actions adopted by experts for diverse reasons, such as rigid preference retention or self-interested exploitation of network structures. To address these challenges, this paper proposes multi-path trust aggregation with decayed trust propagation and a dynamic identification and adaptive penalty mechanism integrating multi-objective optimization to promote the consensus-reaching process in social network group decision-making (SNGDM). First, we propose a multi-path trust aggregation operator with decayed trust propagation, which incorporates a multi-dimensional path analysis framework that evaluates path reliability and structural diversity, thereby building a stable trust network for consensus feedback. Second, a tri-objective consensus optimization model is developed to provide optimal adjustment suggestions by balancing total adjustment cost, consensus degree, and cost fairness. Third, three types of abnormal behaviors are defined, including short-term non-cooperation, persistent non-cooperation, and manipulation. Based on these distinctions, differentiated management mechanisms are introduced. Specifically, a proportional trust decay strategy is applied to non-cooperative behaviors, while an influence-accelerated decay mechanism is designed for manipulative behaviors. In addition, the historical credit index is dynamically linked to unit cost coefficients to force uncooperative and manipulative experts to revise their opinions. Finally, experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Full article

The hospitality industry faces increasing challenges in retaining employees, enhancing employee engagement, and ensuring long-term organizational sustainability. There is ample quantitative research regarding employee engagement and talent management; however, there is a lack of qualitative evidence demonstrating how employee engagement can be sustained in the Middle East’s hospitality industry through the fulfillment of the psychological contract. This study examines how talent management and the fulfillment of the psychological contract contribute to the employee engagement of hotel organizations within the Middle East. The study was designed with an inductive qualitative methodology based on the Psychological Contract Theory and utilized semi-structured interviews with 37 hotel managers, human resource directors, chief executive officers (CEOs), and general managers of four- and five-star hotels from nine Middle Eastern countries. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis with the support of NVivo software. Participants identified psychological contract fulfillment as a primary relational mechanism supporting employee engagement, organizational commitment, and workforce retention. They identified that organizational support, transparent communication, responsive leadership, development opportunities, and employee-focused HRM practices strengthened trust and organizational commitment. The findings reconceptualize talent management as a relational and psychologically embedded organizational mechanism supporting employee engagement and workforce sustainability. Full article

This Perspective examines a central problem in food safety governance: why organisations with well-developed food safety management systems, standard operating procedures, and audit mechanisms may still struggle to achieve stable and consistent frontline food safety practices. Using a narrative integrative review approach, this paper draws on the literature on food safety culture, organisational behaviour, institutional theory, implementation Champions, and frontline practice. It argues that the food safety is not only dependent on the effectiveness of the formal food safety systems, but also on how institutional expectations are interpreted, negotiated, reinforced, and enacted in everyday work. This paper introduces the concept of Food Safety Champions and conceptualises them as translational actors who can help connect formal food safety requirements with situated practice through meaning making, contextual negotiation and behavioural reinforcement. It further suggests that a Champion’s effectiveness depends not only on individual initiative, but also on peer trust, organisational legitimacy, their informal networks and connections, enabling conditions, and continuous institutional feedback. This paper contributes a practice-based conceptual framework for understanding how formal food safety systems may become more meaningful, sustainable, and behaviourally effective in food production environments. Full article

Background/Objectives: Healthcare systems increasingly operate through dense networks of clinicians, managers, public health authorities, institutions, and communities. Disagreement is no longer confined to bedside decisions; it also affects coordination, legitimacy, and implementation at system level. Bioethics, administrative governance, and consultation processes address important parts of this problem, but they do not by themselves provide a dedicated process for handling persistent disagreement, mistrust, and competing values across actors and institutions. This paper proposes medical–bioethical mediation as a potential governance innovation for sustainable, efficient, and resilient healthcare systems. Methods: This is a conceptual framework paper based on an integrative synthesis of selected literature in clinical bioethics mediation, medical mediation, public health ethics, deliberative and participatory governance, trust, inter-organizational coordination, health governance, and health system resilience. It does not report empirical research or a systematic review. Results: The proposed population-level framework is organized around seven linked components: conflict identification, stakeholder mapping, ethical issue clarification, mediation, negotiated solutions, implementation, and feedback and learning. These components form three broader moments: diagnosis, mediated deliberation, and implementation with learning. The framework identifies mechanisms through which mediation may affect health system governance, including conflict transformation, structured ethical deliberation, participation, trust-building, coordination, and adaptive learning. Illustrative scenarios include resource allocation, inter-organizational coordination, public health restrictions, vaccine mistrust, and system reform. The framework is proposed as a hypothesis-generating governance model rather than as a tested intervention. Conclusions: Medical–bioethical mediation should be considered beyond the bedside as a possible system-level governance approach. Its potential value lies in helping health systems manage recurring ethical and institutional conflict more constructively and may strengthen the conditions for legitimacy, coordination, implementation, and learning. Its potential contribution should be understood as plausible but unproven at population level and should be evaluated through pilot implementation, economic analysis, and comparative case research. Full article

Intelligent customer service is increasingly used to reduce service costs and improve efficiency, yet users often experience divergent outcomes, ranging from value co-creation to value co-destruction. Using task–technology fit theory as the primary theoretical lens, this study examines how the alignment between users’ service task requirements and intelligent customer service capabilities is associated with divergent value outcomes. Within this framework, cognitive load and perceived control are theorized as two localized psychological mechanisms, human–AI trust as a conversion mechanism, and digital self-efficacy as a boundary condition. Using two scenario-based experiments, we develop and test the proposed model. Study 1 shows that participants in the high-fit condition reported higher value co-creation and lower value co-destruction than those in the low-fit condition. The results further reveal an asymmetric mechanism: cognitive load did not directly explain value co-creation but was more strongly associated with value co-destruction, whereas perceived control showed a broader association with both value outcomes. Study 2 extends Study 1 by examining digital self-efficacy as a boundary condition and shows that the conditional indirect association patterns vary across levels of digital self-efficacy. These findings contribute to extending task–technology fit theory to post-use value formation and provide cautious implications for intelligent customer service design and management. Full article

RISC-V’s open and extensible design improves flexibility, but it also permits vendors to customize trap behavior and reserved opcode space in ways that can affect exception handling. This paper presents a scoping review of RISC-V exception-handling security, focusing on how traps, privilege transitions, control registers, and handler routines can become attack surfaces when they are not correctly protected. We organize the literature by a five-stage exception lifecycle and map documented attacks and defenses to the architectural state they affect. Our review shows that exception-handling vulnerabilities arise from exposed control registers, insufficiently protected trap entry and return paths, and flawed handler execution. Recent attacks, such as GhostWrite, halt-and-catch-fire conditions, and side-channel exploits, illustrate how weaknesses in exception management can lead to privilege escalation, denial of service, or data leakage. In contrast, defenses are unevenly distributed across the lifecycle: backward-edge return-time integrity is addressed by multiple dedicated mechanisms, while dispatch-time and privilege-transition protection remain largely indirect and are often embedded within broader trusted-execution designs. Because the primary studies report heterogeneous cost metrics, the overhead values we extract are presented as reported rather than normalized across a common benchmark. The literature suggests that lightweight mechanisms, such as Physical Memory Protection and software-based control-flow enforcement, generally incur modest overhead, whereas stronger approaches, such as CHERI-RISC-V and Trusted-Execution Environments, may impose substantially higher costs on exception-heavy workloads. Overall, our findings indicate that exception handling should be treated as a security-critical boundary and that future work should emphasize stage-specific defenses, formal verification, and tighter integration between hardware and software protections. Full article

Maritime operations rely on the Automatic Identification System (AIS), an open broadcast protocol whose unauthenticated, self-reported messages are easily abused. This survey provides an AIS-first, security-focused synthesis of AIS cybersecurity research. It makes three main contributions. First, it explains AIS protocol mechanics and uses them to derive the main security weaknesses that arise from open VHF broadcast, self-reported data, lack of built-in authentication and replay protection, and GNSS dependence. Second, it organizes AIS threats and mitigations into a unified taxonomy that links attack vectors, technical effects, operational impacts, and security measures across the prevent–detect–respond–recover lifecycle. Third, it assesses practical defenses, including authentication proposals, endpoint and network hardening, behavior-aware analytics, cross-sensor validation, and governance measures. The survey shows that existing work is strongest on anomaly detection and AIS data analytics, whereas standards-compatible authentication, scalable key management, backward-compatible deployment, trust-aware display integration, and operational validation remain open challenges. Consequently, AIS security is likely to require layered, staged, and standards-compatible mitigations rather than a single technical fix. By bringing together cybersecurity, maritime operations, and data-science perspectives, the survey provides practical guidance for securing AIS-based systems and highlights open problems for future standardization and implementation. Full article

This study examined the extent to which corporate social responsibility (CSR) dimensions shaped hotel reputation (REP) through customer trust (TRU), and whether customer engagement (ENG) moderated this relationship in the Mekong Delta context. Although prior studies had acknowledged the importance of CSR in shaping customer perceptions, they had paid limited attention to the distinct effects of multidimensional CSR and the conditions under which TRU was transformed into REP. A structured questionnaire survey was administered to 874 hotel guests in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. The measurement scales were adapted from previous studies and refined through a pilot test. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), together with bootstrapping, was used to test the direct, mediating, and moderating effects. CSR dimensions exhibited heterogeneous effects. Customer-oriented responsibility had the strongest impact on both TRU and REP, followed by environmental and economic responsibilities. Legal responsibility directly enhanced REP but did not significantly affect TRU, whereas community responsibility strengthened TRU without directly influencing REP. TRU significantly improved REP and mediated most CSR–REP relationships. ENG positively moderated the TRU–REP link, amplifying reputational outcomes. The study contributed to CSR and hospitality research by modeling CSR as a multidimensional construct and by identifying ENG as a boundary condition that strengthened the TRU–REP mechanism. Managers should prioritize customer-focused CSR and enhance engagement to maximize reputational gains. Full article

Objective: This paper develops a conceptual theory-building framework for understanding and managing AI-enabled workplace conflict. It reframes AI-mediated conflict as a socio-technical justice problem and proposes the Hybrid Conflict Governance Model (HCGM), which links HR policy design, ethical governance mechanisms, and workforce capability development to conflict outcomes through procedural justice, trust, contestability, and human oversight pathways. Methods: This study adopts a conceptual theory-building design based on interdisciplinary literature synthesis. Literature from human resource management, artificial intelligence governance, organizational justice, socio-technical systems theory, digital work, and workplace conflict was synthesized using a problem-driven conceptual approach. The study integrates these literature streams to develop a theoretical framework explaining how AI-enabled workplace conflict emerges and how governance mechanisms may influence conflict outcomes. Conceptual Findings: The analysis identifies four major AI-enabled conflict dynamics: algorithmic bias, algorithmic surveillance, human–AI decision misalignment, and opacity in AI-supported decision making. The proposed HCGM explains how AI system characteristics influence employee justice perceptions, trust, and conflict escalation or reduction. The model identifies four interdependent governance layers: foundational rights, structural governance, operational integration, and capability development. These layers interact dynamically and are shaped by boundary conditions including organizational culture, AI autonomy, workforce digital literacy, and regulatory context. Conclusion: AI-enabled workplace conflict cannot be managed through technical controls alone. Effective governance requires integrated HR policies, ethical oversight, transparent decision processes, human review mechanisms, and workforce capability development. The HCGM contributes to AI governance, HRM, and workplace conflict literature by explaining how socio-technical governance mechanisms shape fairness perceptions, trust, and conflict outcomes in AI-mediated workplaces. Full article

This study acknowledges the role of high-involvement work practices (HIWPs) in promoting proactive behavior among public organization employees, addressing the need to obtain further insights into the mechanisms and identify contingencies (i.e., both conditional and individual factors) that might impede the effectiveness of such practices. This builds on emerging empirical studies in the public management literature by drawing on social exchange theory and social cognitive theory to empirically test the impact of HIWPs on employees’ proactive behavior, using data collected through a two-wave, time-lagged survey design with a one-month interval from Turkish public organizations. The mediating role of public relations values was also examined, along with the moderating roles of role breadth self-efficacy and employees’ use of normative public values. Relying on 554 data obtained from Turkish public organization employees, this study finds that HIWPs positively impact employees’ proactive behavior and public relations values. Public relations values positively impact employees’ proactive behavior and partially mediate the link between HIWPs and employees’ proactive behavior. Role breadth self-efficacy moderates the positive relationship between HIWPs and public relations values, with the relationship being stronger for employees with high role breadth self-efficacy than for those with low. Employees’ use of normative public values moderates the positive link between public relations values and employees’ proactive behavior, with the relationship being stronger for employees with high use of normative public values than for those with low. The main theoretical and practical implications of the study’s outcomes are outlined and discussed, along with important future research directions. The findings highlight the importance of human-centric organizational practices in fostering public value in VUCA-D environments. By enabling proactive behavior, public organizations can enhance adaptability, support value co-creation with citizens, and strengthen trust in public service systems. Full article