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Not long ago, the Russian legislation introduced the escrow institution, which has a long history in the foreign legal order and is actively used around the world for settlements and risk management. The escrow is quite a convenient and flexible legal instrument, the essence of which is that by the will of the parties between them there is one more entity - the so-called escrow-agent, who controls the fulfillment of the obligation by keeping the assets transferred under the condition. The popularity of such a design in the civil circulation of many foreign countries is conditioned by the analysis in the article of the prospects for the further development of the escrow institution in Russia. The paper presents foreign experience, in particular, the experience of the USA - the state in which the escrow has received the greatest development, and whose escrow model is traditionally taken as a model, suggests ways to improve the domestic legislation in order to bring to a certain unification with the world trends of development of law.

Institution-based trust is a buyer’s perception that effective third-party institutional mechanisms are in place to facilitate transaction success. This paper integrates sociological and economic theories about institution-based trust to propose that the perceived effectiveness of three IT-enabled institutional mechanisms–specifically feedback mechanisms, third-party escrow services, and credit card guarantees–engender buyer trust in the community of online auction sellers. Trust in the marketplace intermediary that provides the overarching institutional context also builds buyer’s trust in the community of sellers. In addition, buyers’ trust in the community of sellers (as a group) facilitates online transactions by reducing perceived risk. Data collected from 274 buyers in Amazon’s online auction marketplace provide support for the proposed structural model. Longitudinal data collected a year later show that transaction intentions are correlated with actual and self-reported buyer behavior. The study shows that the perceived effectiveness of institutional mechanisms encompasses both \"weak\" (market-driven) and \"strong\" (legally binding) mechanisms. These mechanisms engender trust, not only in a few reputable sellers, but also in the entire community of sellers, which contributes to an effective online marketplace. The results thus help explain why, despite the inherent uncertainty that arises when buyers and sellers are separated in time and in space, online marketplaces are proliferating. Implications for theory are discussed, and suggestions for future research on improving IT-enabled trust-building mechanisms are suggested.

Internet fraud has been on the rise in online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auction markets, posing serious challenges to people's trust in electronic markets. Among various remedies to promote trust and reduce trader's risk, online escrow service has been proposed as a trusted third party to protect online transactions from Internet fraud. However, whether an escrow service constitutes a viable business model for a trusted third party to effectively block Internet fraud remains an open question. This research proposes a dynamic game model for online traders and a profit maximization model for the escrow service provider. Through the investigation of the optimal strategies of online traders, we explore the relationships among traders' decision making, escrow service fee rates, and adoption rates. We reveal the demand for escrow services and establish the optimal pricing rule for the escrow service provider. A numerical study based on the theoretical analysis is conducted to provide detailed guidelines of the model application for an escrow service provider and to explore if the escrow service is a viable business model in C2C auction markets.

We study optimal compensation in a dynamic framework where the CEO consumes in multiple periods, can undo the contract by privately saving, and can temporarily inflate earnings. We obtain a simple closed-form contract that yields clear predictions for how the level and performance sensitivity of pay vary over time and across firms. The contract can be implemented by escrowing the CEO's pay into a \"Dynamic Incentive Account\" that comprises cash and the firm's equity. The account features state-dependent rebalancing to ensure its equity proportion is always sufficient to induce effort, and time-dependent vesting to deter short-termism.

The rising usage of IoT devices in everyday life has formed smart cities that require the adoption of decentralized systems for a secure and transparent mechanism to manage asset exchange across automotive supply chains. Several existing Blockchain-based models built on public chains focus on traceability while overlooking scalability limits, transaction fees, conditional payment trust, or real-time delivery validation. We introduce DeFiTrustChain, a DeFi-enabled framework that combines free NFTs, escrow-based automation, and IoT verification within a Hyperledger Fabric network. It represents each vehicle using a unique NFT to capture the details of manufacturing and ownership, along with immutable asset verification. The payment release between stakeholders is governed by a dedicated escrow contract responsible for IoT-based delivery confirmation. The proposed framework ensures authenticated access and prevents identity misuse through integration of the Fabric Certificate Authority. The experimental results demonstrate the coherent and dependable execution of NFT creation, escrow enforcement, and IoT-triggered validation, with low local transaction processing time and consistent behavior across peers.

[...]the results of the first nationally randomized experiment of the FSS program revealed ongoing challenges, most notably, a substantially high drop-out rate, a low retention or participation rate, and the inability of FSS participants to achieve the long-term goals of increasing earnings, reducing reliance on government assistance, and improving material well-being. [...]the main objective of this symposium is to draw lessons from the body of research on the FSS program to offer innovative yet feasible solutions for improving program design, implementation, and delivery. In the national evaluation of the FSS program that collected data from 2012 to 2021, a baseline of 56 percent of heads of household were working, and 30 percent of heads of household were working full time (Freedman et al., 2023). [...]the FSS program can potentially improve self-sufficiency through several avenues: entry into the workforce for those not yet working, increasing hours among those working less than full time, and increasing earnings among those working, including those already working full time. The retrospective study by Ficke and Piesse (2004) involved an analysis of HUD administrative data collected from the program's inception in 1996 through 2000 to assess variation in program implementation. [...]for those who remained in the program and graduated, the average escrow generated was about $3,076 (Ficke and Piesse, 2004: 22). To address this limitation, PD&R commissioned the first national FSS evaluation involving a randomized controlled experiment to gauge the programs impacts on individuals and families seeking financial independence and stability. Because the FSS program is voluntary, a randomized experiment would rectify the inherent bias associated with self-selection and allow us to assess the programs impacts independently of endogenous factors.

In the paper, using the three-statement financial modelling methodology as applied to a representative development project, we aim to analyse, ex ante, the industry-level impact of transition to mandatory escrow schemes in residential and mixed-use construction in Tashkent city (due to be implemented in Uzbekistan from 2026). Modelling single-milestone escrow plans against the current steep-discount advance-based system of off-plans as a baseline, the model accounts for salient institutional features of the Tashkent city development market, including land auctioning, full-cycle Value-added tax (VAT) accounting, and Tax loss carryforward provisions. It also incorporates a framework for demand-driven residual valuations for the development land element. Our findings indicate practically unchanged cashflow profitability of developers on the market in question. Around 30% p.a. in nominal Free-cashflow-to-equity based IRRs expressed in the national currency, provided that the transition to the greater use of leverage in funding unfolds as expected. The disappearance of steep off-plan discounts while the transition to escrows unfolds will be countervailed by the reliance on costly loans from escrow banks. Absent the greater use of leverage, the IRR (FCFE) profitability of the developers is expected to decline by some 5%. For the apartment buyers, this is effectively equivalent to increasing property transaction prices on the primary market in line with their headline asking amounts. Thus-generated economic surplus will be partially captured by the developers and partially passed through to escrow banks, increasing their gross profits by up to $50M, p.a. due to their new role in financing Tashkent city residential developments that are still largely equity-driven. Apart from this effect, we find only a moderate financial leverage influence on developers’ profitability due to the high-interest-rate environment prevailing in Uzbekistan. We also find a demand-driven pressure on land auction prices suggested by increasingly back-loaded alterations in project cashflow profiles. This study also purports to make a material contribution to the evolving body of literature on financial modelling of apartment and mixed-use property developments by offering a flexible three-statement modelling framework with innovative endogenised equity management features.

Revocable attribute-based encryption (RABE) provides greater flexibility and fine-grained access control for data sharing. However, the revocation process for most RABE schemes today is performed by the cloud storage provider (CSP). Since the CSP is an honest and curious third party, there is no guarantee that the plaintext data corresponding to the new ciphertext after revocation is the same as the original plaintext data. In addition, most attribute-based encryption schemes suffer from issues related to key escrow. To overcome the aforementioned issues, we present an efficient RABE scheme that supports data integrity while also addressing the key escrow issue. We demonstrate the security for our system, which is reduced to the decisional q-parallel bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent (q-PBDHE) assumption and discrete logarithm (DL) assumption. The performance analysis illustrates that our scheme is efficient.

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) can achieve data confidentiality as well as fine-grained access control of encrypted data in data outsourcing systems. However, we urgently need to address both decryption key escrow and key abuse problems, and enhance expressiveness of ABE in practice. We present a new ABE scheme, which supports high expressiveness, solves the key escrow and abuse issues and provides traceability simultaneously. Our scheme does not limit the size of the attributes set and access policies and supports non-monotonic access structures. There is no authority holds sufficient privileges to generate and fabricate the decryption keys. And only data users have their own complete decryption keys. Anyone can run the trace algorithm of our scheme to track the malicious user. Our key sanity check algorithm will check out if a decryption key is modified. Our scheme is resistant to key escrow, user key abuse and authorized key attacks. We implement and test our scheme on a personal laptop. The experimental results show that the running times of encryption and decryption algorithms are less than one second when it deals with access policy or attributes set with one hundred attributes. Implementation results and related comparisons show that our scheme is effective and efficient. Our scheme is based on the bilinear groups of prime order and is proved to be selectively secure under the n-(B) assumption.

Consortium blockchains offer privacy for members while allowing supervision peers access to on-chain data under certain circumstances. However, current key escrow schemes rely on vulnerable traditional asymmetric encryption/decryption algorithms. To address this issue, we have designed and implemented an enhanced post-quantum key escrow system for consortium blockchains. Our system integrates NIST post-quantum public-key encryption/KEM algorithms and various post-quantum cryptographic tools to provide a fine-grained, single-point-of-dishonest-resistant, collusion-proof and privacy-preserving solution. We also offer chaincodes, related APIs, and invoking command lines for development. Finally, we perform detailed security analysis and performance evaluation, including the consumed time of chaincode execution and the needed on-chain storage space, and we also highlight the security and performance of related post-quantum KEM algorithms on consortium blockchain.