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Secure communication is very important for computer networks. Thereby, authentication is one of the most eminent preconditions. In ad hoc networks, common authentication schemes are not applicable since public key infrastructures with a centralized certification authority are hard to deploy in ad hoc networking environments. This paper aims to investigate these issues.

In order to overcome these issues, the paper proposes and evaluates a security concept based on a distributed certification facility. Thereby, a network is divided into clusters with one special head node each. These cluster head nodes perform administrative functions and hold shares of a network key used for certification. New nodes start to participate in the network as guests; they can only become full members with a network‐signed certificate after their authenticity has been warranted by some other members. Access to resources and services within the ad hoc network is controlled using authorization certificates.

The feasibility of this concept was verified by simulations. Three different models for node mobility were used in order to include realistic scenarios as well as to make the results comparable to other work. The simulation results include an evaluation of the log‐on times, availability, and communication overhead.

The paper introduces a cluster‐based architecture to realize a distributed public key infrastructure that is highly adapted to the characteristics of ad hoc networks.

Law enforcement agents enforce rules that they might transgress in their private lives. Building from a theory of “hypocrisy aversion” where agents incur psychological costs from imposing a sanction on others for rules that they might break, the authors design a two-player game in which players are simultaneously placed in the roles of enforcer and potential transgressor. In this model, discretionary enforcement is endogenous to the size of the sanction. Conditional on rewards to enforcement and punishment that are both sufficiently small in the status quo, the authors demonstrate that price effects can be dominated by second-order hypocrisy effects, leading to rates of transgression that increase with larger sanctions. The authors test the model within a laboratory experiment where individuals can simultaneously gamble at the expense of a third party and punish those they observe gambling. Examining the comparable testable predictions of models of (i) selfish agents, (ii) pro-social agents, and (iii) pro-social agents who are averse to hypocrisy, the authors find evidence of hypocrisy aversion in the rates of gambling, sanctioning, and the changing composition of agent strategies. Our results suggest that increasing sanctions can backfire in the deterrence of common criminal and non-criminal offenses.

Misinformation is notoriously difficult to combat. Although social media firms have focused on combating the publication of misinformation, misinformation accusations, an important by-product of the spread of misinformation, have been neglected. The authors offer insights into factors contributing to the spread of misinformation accusations on social media platforms.

The authors use a corpus of 234,556 tweets about the 2020 US presidential election (Study 1) and 99,032 tweets about the 2022 US midterm elections (Study 2) to show how the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by locomotion orientation.

The study findings indicate that the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by writers' lower locomotion orientation, which is amplified among liberal tweet writers.

Practitioners and policymakers can use the study findings to track and reduce the spread of misinformation accusations by developing algorithms to analyze the language of posts. A limitation of this research is that it focuses on political misinformation accusations. Future research in different contexts, such as vaccines, would be pertinent.

The authors show how social media firms can identify messages containing misinformation accusations with the potential to become viral by considering the tweet writer's locomotion language and geographical data.

Early identification of messages containing misinformation accusations can help to improve the quality of the political conversation and electoral decision-making.

Strategies used by social media platforms to identify misinformation lack scale and perform poorly, making it important for social media platforms to manage misinformation accusations in an effort to retain trust. The authors identify linguistic and geographical factors that drive misinformation accusation retweets.