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Protection and enforcement of trade secrets outside the USA have been minimal and undeveloped and of particular concern when using the Internet. Substantive and procedural laws vary from country to country. In recent years there has been a move toward harmonization under the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 1994. However, the provisions of TRIPS allow for varying periods for member countries to come into compliance. In the meantime international protection of trade secrets is uncertain, thus necessitating the development and implementation of strategies for preserving trade secrets in the international business environment. This paper discusses those strategies, beginning with defining and identifying a company’s trade secrets and the formulation of various policy measures to be taken to protect trade secrets, with emphasis on the risks inherent in the loss of trade secrets when using the Internet and how to eliminate or reduce that risk.

In this paper we look at patents as alternative to trade secrets. We disentangle the disclosure motive for patent protection from the traditional reward motive by adjusting the level of patent protection so as to make the innovator just indifferent between patenting and keeping the innovation secret. Thus, we keep the reward (expected profits) to the innovator fixed and focus on ex post efficiency. When duplication is not feasible and secrecy only entails the risk of public disclosure (a leakage), patents and secrets are perfect substitutes. Yet, a distinctive features of trade secret protection is that it allows for independent creation. The duplicative efforts to reproduce a concealed innovation make patents and secrets imperfect substitutes. If such duplicative efforts are actually exerted under secrecy, patents provide the pre-specified incentive to innovate at least social cost. If, however, the threat of duplication induces the innovator to preemptively license her trade secret, and such licensing agreements allow the innovator to appropriate all the saved duplication costs, then secrets can reward innovative activity more efficiently than patents. Thus, the issue of whether patents are socially preferable to secrets boils down to an assessment of the prevalence and the efficiency of trade secret licensing. The available empirical evidence suggests that licensing of trade secret information is limited and so hints at the superiority of patents.

Secret consumption refers to consumption of a product in a private situation, with the intent or behavior of hiding the consumption from others. This study contributes to the secret consumption literature by identifying the antecedents of secret consumption along with the explaining mechanism and boundary condition.

An online study with experiment design was conducted to examine the impact of extroversion/introversion, self-presentation and product scarcity on secrete consumption.

The results show that consumer extraverted disposition and the self-presentation motive negatively influence secret consumption intention and suggest this relationship is explained by the self-presentation need. The findings also revealed that perceived product scarcity attenuated the negative impact of extraversion and self-presentation on secret consumption intention.

The findings provide interesting insights into advertising and retailing. In recognizing that secret consumption is a prevalent phenomenon in consumer behavior that may improve actual consumer product evaluation and preference, retailers or brand managers may encourage consumers to consume secretly.

This empirical study is a first attempt to explore the antecedents, mediating mechanism and boundary condition of consumer intention to engage in secrete consumption. The findings of the study provide important implication to theoretical development and managerial applications in advertising and retailing.

Looks at the recent US court decision in the case of Pepsico v. Redmond. The case centred on the circumstances of Quaker’s hiring of William Redmond, a former Pepsico marketing executive, to co‐ordinate the company’s distribution strategy for its newly‐acquired Snapple product line. At issue in the Redmond case was the unique question of whether or not knowledge of corporate strategy could be considered protectable proprietary information under the American incarnation of trade secret law. To understand the setting for the Redmond case, presents a brief overview of trade secret law in the USA. Then, after an examination of the facts and judicial decision in the Redmond case, concludes with a discussion of the implications of this case for marketing strategic decision making and executive recruitment in the post‐Redmond environment.

This paper aims to investigate how competition among online auction sellers influences the setting of both open and secret reserve prices, thereby affecting auction outcome.

Using a data set collected from eBay consisting of 787 identical product auctions, three empirical models have been proposed. Model 1 simultaneously estimates the effects of auction competition on a seller’s own open and secret reserve price strategies; Model 2 estimates the effects of auction competition on bidder participation; and Model 3 estimates the direct and indirect effects of auction competition on selling price.

Competition among sellers is central to shaping sellers’ reserve price strategies. When there are more concurrent auctions for identical items, sellers tend to specify a low open reserve and are less likely to set a secret reserve. Sellers are strongly influenced by competitors’ reserve price strategies, and tend to follow competition. Finally, auction competition and competitive reserve price strategies influence both bidder entry and selling prices.

This study has important implications for both sellers and bidders. It highlights the importance for sellers to adapt their reserve price strategies in light of their competitors’ reserve price strategies and offers implications for bidders regarding auction selection. An auction with low starting bid does not necessarily lead to a lower selling price as it attracts more bidders.

This paper focuses on competition among auction sellers, whereas previous literature has focused on competition among bidders. This paper is the first to study the impact of competing reserve prices in auctions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of remote surveillance or satellite imagery as they relate to trade secret law, knowledge management, and competitive intelligence.

The paper approaches legal issues from the perspective of a trade secret holder.

While conducting research for this paper, it was found that, while technological improvements relating to satellite imagery and remote sensing are increasingly more precise and ubiquitous, the laws protecting businesses that have an interest in protecting trade secrets are inconsistent. On the one hand, the US Government has given itself a powerful tool to protect trade secrets under the Economic Espionage Act. On the other hand, the Government has granted remote satellite companies licences under which they may sell satellite images to industrial competitors, consequently thwarting trade secret protection efforts

Trade secrets represent a valuable contribution to a nation's economy, particularly when some interventions do not meet the requirements necessary for more traditional intellectual property regime protection (e.g. copyright, trade mark, patents). A trade secret's value lies in it remaining hidden. There are few cases addressing trade secrets and satellite imagery. The stalwart case, E.I. duPont deNemours & Co., Inc. v. Rolfe Christopher, represents a tentative foray into the subject, but only suggests the rights a trade secret holder may have when a commercial satellite company collects otherwise innocuous data and sells those to a competitor. A proper plaintiff to test the boundaries surrounding trade secret law, satellite imagery, and competitive intelligence remains at large.

This paper aims to describe the results of three rounds of secret shopping conducted at the Hubert Library of Florida International University, and how the results affected and were affected by changes made to circulation desk student training programs.

Volunteers from the campus community asked circulation desk work‐study students preformulated questions, in person or by phone, and recorded both the answers and service quality perceptions for analysis.

Analysis of the results revealed that the program did what it was designed to do: highlight customer service strengths and weaknesses. A majority of shoppers reported favourable experiences, but identified problematic areas and situations to be addressed in student worker training.

Some of the most valuable data came from secret shoppers' comments, which made clear the need to revisit some of the questions. In some instances shoppers' desires to highlight the positive and deemphasize the negative indicated apparent bias.

This study shows how a secret shopping program can guide and fine‐tune a library student training program as opposed to a librarian or library staff training program.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the use of priority‐based incentives for collaborative hiding of confidential information in dynamic environments, such as self‐organized networks, peer‐to‐peer systems, pervasive and grid computing applications.

The paper documents the necessity of ISSON (Incentives for Secret‐sharing in Self‐Organised Networks); it provides functional and technical details on the proposed architecture; and, it assesses its feasibility in mobile ad‐hoc networks through real experiments. The paper elaborates on the availability of the hidden information through an analytical framework.

Through the real experiments, ISSON was found to be efficient in terms of communication and processing costs. Additionally, it avoids collusions for unauthorized revealing of the hidden information, and ensures the unlinkability and availability of the secret when it is divided and stored to peers.

The proposed, incentive‐based, privacy enforcement architecture is novel and applies to distributed, dynamic, and self‐configured computing environments.

The detection of an adversary in secret image sharing has been a problematic side in the reconstruction phase. Some of verifiable secret sharing solutions have been proposed to solve the problem. However, there is some computational limitation in the previous schemes. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the importance of consistency for detecting an adversary in a secure reconstruction phase. Strong t-consistency assures the correctness of reconstructed secret as long as participants P ∈ N and n(P) = t. Consistency is a solution for preventing the participant to be absent and helps the dealer to easily detect the adversary without an additional verification step.

This paper focuses on secure reconstruction, and uses two different approaches, namely, single-secret and multi-secret, to experiment the relationship between the given variable (t,m,n) and the adversaries by observing the quality test result, polynomial approach and visualization.

The results show that t and m are inversely proportional to the image quality without respect to the polynomial approach. The reconstruction phase is declared as securely conducted when m = 2t − 1, for both single- and multi-secret approaches.

The application of consistency is a considerable step for securing the secret from an adversary by combining the reconstruction phase and the consistency combination at once, removing the need for additional separate verification steps for decreasing the computational time, especially in secret image sharing.

The anonymity of the Internet supports an increasing number of deviant behaviors such as secret affairs. This paper aims to investigate whether religiosity has a negative relationship with the incidence of secret affairs in cyberspace and how it moderates the substitution effect between the use of online and off-line channels for such deviant behaviors.

The authors constructed a cross-sectional county-level dataset containing data on US religious adherents' ratios and actual expenditures on a social website related to extramarital affairs. The data were analyzed by ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares regression models.

In general, religiosity has a negative relationship with secret affairs in cyberspace. It also moderates the relationship between using online (secret affairs websites) and off-line (entertainment facilities) channels for extramarital affairs. The deterrent effect of religiosity is weakened in religious communities with diversified religious teachings/structures and stricter requirements.

This work enriches the understanding of the role of religiosity in online deviant behaviors and provides essential insights for policymakers (e.g. in relation to spillover effects of social norms in cyberspace).