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Operational Factors Affecting the Confidentiality of Proprietary Digital Assets

Massimino, Brett J
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405683732

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Business Administration.
The leakage of an organization's proprietary, digital assets to unauthorized parties can be a catastrophic event for any organization. The magnitude of these events have been recently underscored by the Target data breach, in which 70 million consumer credit card accounts were compromised, and financial costs are expected to exceed $1 billion. Digital assets have steadily progressed beyond low-value data and information, and into high-value knowledge-based domains. Failures to protect these latter types of digital assets can have even greater implications for firms or even macroeconomic conditions. Using the Target event as an illustrative motivation, we highlight the importance of two relatively-unexplored topics within the domain of digital asset protections - (1) vendor management, and (2) worker adherence to standard, well-codified procedures and technologies. We explicitly consider each of these topics through the separate empirical efforts detailed in this dissertation. Our first empirical effort examines the effects of sourcing and location decisions on the confidentiality of digital assets. We frame our study within a product-development dyad, with a proprietary, digital asset being shared between partners. We treat confidentiality as a performance dimension that is influenced by each organization accessing the asset. Specifically, we empirically investigate the realm of electronic video game development and the illegal distribution activities of these products. We employ a series of web-crawling data collection programs to compile an extensive secondary dataset covering the legitimate development activities for the industry. We then harvest data from the archives of a major, black-market distribution channel, and leverage these data to derive a novel, product-level measure of asset confidentiality. We examine the interacting factors of industrial clustering (agglomeration) and national property rights legislations in affecting this confidentiality measure. We find that (1) firms within industry clusters tend to have significantly higher levels of asset confidentiality, (2) strong national property rights tend to suppress this benefit, and (3) these effects are greatly amplified for client organizations. Our second empirical effort seeks insight into the compliance behaviors of workers with tasks related to digital asset protections. Here, we frame a general, dual-task setting in which a worker has a procedural task as a primary responsibility (e.g., manufacturing), but is also requested to comply with a discretionary, protection-oriented task. We draw from Goal Setting Theory and task switching theories to elicit two factors which may significantly impact the worker's performance on each of these tasks: (1) the level of resource utilization for the worker, and (2) the level of attribution (group vs. individual) held for the protection-oriented task. In our analyses, we examine several performance variables, including: task performance, task switching and sequencing behaviors, and goal achievement levels. Through a controlled, laboratory experiment, we find that individual accountability on the protection task positively relates to the subjects' performance on both tasks. We also find evidence for a negative, nonlinear relationship between resource utilization and performance of the protection-oriented task, and find that this relationship is further moderated by the protection-tasks type of outcome attribution.
John Gray (Advisor)
Kenneth Boyer (Advisor)
James Hill (Committee Member)
Elliot Bendoly (Committee Member)
345 p.
Business Administration
Information Security; Intellectual Property; Breach; Digital Economy; Supply Chain Management; Confidentiality; Asset Protections; Software Development; Worker Behaviors; Behavioral Operations Management; Data Protection; Big Data

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Massimino, B. J. (2014). Operational Factors Affecting the Confidentiality of Proprietary Digital Assets [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405683732

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Massimino, Brett. Operational Factors Affecting the Confidentiality of Proprietary Digital Assets. 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405683732.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Massimino, Brett. "Operational Factors Affecting the Confidentiality of Proprietary Digital Assets." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405683732

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1405683732
2,103
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.