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Since the beginning of the 1980s, a comprehensive system of adult education has been established in China to meet the requirements of rapid socioeconomic development. This article gives a description of this system. The main measures taken by governments at various levels were making elementary education available in all rural areas to stem the number of new illiterates; focusing adult literacy work on the 12 to 45 age group; and utilizing various methods, including vocational training, to consolidate the newly literate. Experience has shown that, in rural areas, the most effective way to promote adult education is that the three major components of rural education—elementary, vocational, and adult—be conducted in a coordinated manner. In urban areas, emphasis was given to providing on‐the‐job training designed to improve professional knowledge and skills of those employees in industries experiencing fast technological advancement. Retraining for those whose jobs were eliminated by poorly performing public enterprises has become an urgent need. Although there were great achievements during the 1980s, many problems still exist. Improving quality of teaching, modifying curriculum to meet the needs of local development, providing short‐term agricultural‐technical training in rural areas, offering retraining for the unemployed, and mobilizing financial resources from all sectors of the society are among the measures which the Chinese government has taken in the 1990s to further develop its adult education system.

Cybersecurity is a national priority in this big data era. Because of the lack of incentives and the existence of negative externality, companies often underinvest in addressing security risks and accidents, despite government and industry recommendations. In the present article, we propose a method that utilizes reputation through information disclosure to motivate companies to behave pro-socially, improving their Internet security. Using outbound spam as a proxy for Internet security, we conducted a quasiexperimental field study for eight countries through SpamRankings.net. This outgoingspam-based study shows that information disclosure on outgoing spam can help reduce outgoing spam, approximately by 16 percent. This finding suggests that information disclosure can be leveraged to encourage companies to reduce security threats. It also provides support for public policies that require mandatory reporting from organizations and offers implications for evaluating and executing such policies.

Cybersecurity is a national priority in this big data era. Because of negative externalities and the resulting lack of economic incentives, companies often underinvest in security controls, despite government and industry recommendations. Although many existing studies on security have explored technical solutions, only a few have looked at the economic motivations. To fill the gap, we propose an approach to increase the incentives of organizations to address security problems. Specifically, we utilize and process existing security vulnerability data, derive explicit security performance information, and disclose the information as feedback to organizations and the public. We regularly release information on the organizations with the worst security behaviors, imposing reputation loss on them. The information is also used by organizations for self-evaluation in comparison to others. Therefore, additional incentives are solicited out of reputation concern and social comparison. To test the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted a field quasi-experiment for outgoing spam for 1,718 autonomous systems in eight countries and published SpamRankings.net, the website we created to release information. We found that the treatment group subject to information disclosure reduced outgoing spam approximately by 16%. We also found that the more observed outgoing spam from the top spammer, the less likely an organization would be to reduce its own outgoing spam, consistent with the prediction by social comparison theory. Our results suggest that social information and social comparison can be effectively leveraged to encourage desirable behavior. Our study contributes to both information architecture design and public policy by suggesting how information can be used as intervention to impose economic incentives. The usual disclaimers apply for NSF grants 1228990 and 0831338.

Cybersecurity is a national priority in this big data era. Because of negative externalities and the resulting lack of economic incentives, companies often underinvest in security controls, despite government and industry recommendations. Although many existing studies on security have explored technical solutions, only a few have looked at the economic motivations. To fill the gap, we propose an approach to increase the incentives of organizations to address security problems. Specifically, we utilize and process existing security vulnerability data, derive explicit security performance information, and disclose the information as feedback to organizations and the public. We regularly release information on the organizations with the worst security behaviors, imposing reputation loss on them. The information is also used by organizations for self-evaluation in comparison to others. Therefore, additional incentives are solicited out of reputation concern and social comparison. To test the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted a field quasi-experiment for outgoing spam for 1,718 autonomous systems in eight countries and published SpamRankings.net, the website we created to release information. We found that the treatment group subject to information disclosure reduced outgoing spam approximately by 16%. We also found that the more observed outgoing spam from the top spammer, the less likely an organization would be to reduce its own outgoing spam, consistent with the prediction by social comparison theory. Our results suggest that social information and social comparison can be effectively leveraged to encourage desirable behavior. Our study contributes to both information architecture design and public policy by suggesting how information can be used as intervention to impose economic incentives.