Call for Papers

The Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) is the leading forum for interdisciplinary scholarship on information security and privacy, combining expertise from the fields of economics, social science, business, law, policy, and computer science.

***Note, this year’s WEIS will run on an accelerated schedule with a submission deadline in November 2023 and the conference taking place in April 2024.***

Prior workshops have explored the role of incentives between attackers and defenders of information systems, identified market failures surrounding internet security, quantified cybercrime costs and risks of personal data disclosure, and assessed investments in cyber-defense. The 2024 workshop will build on past efforts using empirical and analytic tools not only to understand threats, but also to strengthen security and privacy through novel evaluations of available solutions.

Topics of interest

We encourage economists, computer scientists, legal scholars, business school researchers, security and privacy specialists, as well as industry experts to submit their research and participate by attending the workshop.

Suggested topics include (but are not limited to) empirical and theoretical studies of:

  • Cyber risk management
    • Vulnerability discovery, disclosure, and patchingIncentives for and against pervasive monitoring threatsCyber-risk quantification
    • Cyber-insurance
  • Economics and governance of privacy
    • Economics of privacy and anonymity
    • Behavioral security and privacy
    • Data privacy and policy
  • Cybercrime
    • Models and analysis of online crime (including botnets, ransomware, and underground markets)
    • Analysis of costs of cybercrime and impacts of counter-measures
  • Cybersecurity policy
    • Security standards and regulation
    • Incentives for information sharing and cooperation
    • Cyber-defense strategy
    • Geopolitical and international relations aspects of cybersecurity, including cyberterrorism

Submission

Submitted manuscripts should represent significant and novel research contributions. WEIS has no formal discipline or formatting guidelines. Previous contributors spanned fields from economics and psychology to computer science and law, each with different norms and expectations about manuscript length and formatting.

All paper manuscripts will have to be submitted in anonymized form for double-blind review.
(See https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/6/228027-effectiveness-of-anonymization-in-double-blind-review/abstract for arguments substantiating this requirement.)

To that effect:

  • The title page should not contain any author names or affiliations.
  • Authors should carefully review figures and appendices (especially survey instruments) to ensure affiliations are not accidentally included.
  • When referring to your previous work, do so in the third person, as though it were written by someone else. Only blind the reference itself in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible.
  • Authors may include links to websites that contain source code, tools, or other supplemental material. Neither the link in the paper nor the website or any of the materials therein may contain the authors’ names and affiliations.

Papers that are not properly anonymized may be rejected without review.

While submitted papers must be anonymous, authors may choose to give talks about their work, post a preprint of the paper online, disclose security vulnerabilities to vendors or the public, etc. during the review process.

Papers should be submitted through the submission server.

Important Dates

Submission system opens : October 1 2023

Submission deadline (for papers) : 10 December 2023 (11:59 p.m. PST)

Notification of acceptance : February 15, 2024

Final papers due (revisions) : March 30, 2024

Workshop dates : April 8-10, 2024