The consideration of drones for last mile delivery brings with it several challenges that include both physical ones such as battery life, drone range, carrying capacity, and form factor of the drone as well as those related to security and privacy of the parties associated with any given packet as well as its content. Privacy and security aspects are significant since last mile delivery drones operate outside the warehouse and are not under complete control of the delivery service operator. This is especially salient with respect to communications between the drone and outside entities that are not necessarily authorised for such communication by the operator. Even if such outside entities are authorised to communicate with the drone, while it is in the open, there may be restrictions on the types of information it can reveal to any given external entity. In addition to an overview of the main security and privacy issues in drone-based last mile delivery, we discuss general security and privacy issues and how these translate to drone-based last mile delivery. We consider various facets of issues related to privacy and security of drone-based last mile delivery. Specifically, we study risks associated with privacy and security in this environment with specific emphasis on those related to codes, external entities, and communication signals. We then identify some of the gaps in associated extant academic literature that could potentially be addressed in future studies.

The use of RFID tags in healthcare applications has been gaining momentum over the past decade. This is partly due to recent advances in information technology and the need to reduce errors while simultaneously improving the efficiency of the system. We, at the RFID European Lab, have been studying various aspects of RFID implementations in healthcare environment over the past several years. The potential for RFID implementations in healthcare environment is enormous. We consider several such opportunities and identify possible extensions.

Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are gaining widespread popularity throughout the supply chain from raw material acquisition, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, retailing to the ultimate consumers. A majority of extant literature in this area explore the beneficial aspects of RFID tags such as their batch readability, resistance to harsh environmental conditions, information storage and processing capability, among others. Given the recent explosion of interest in RFID tag incorporation in supply chains, literature in the area has not yet comprehensively identified nor addressed associated challenges and impediments to successful implementations. We purport to fill this gap and to raise awareness by identifying and discussing critical issues such as ownership transfer, privacy/security, computing bottleneck, read error, and cost-benefit issues such as opportunity cost, risk of obsolescence, information sharing, and inter-operability standards.

We consider a homogeneous product market and the incentive for oligopolists to share item-level product information with their customers. Enabled by Radio Frequency Identification technology, each firm has the option to record and reveal item-level information of a proportion of its products. We consider a two-stage game where each firm first decides its production plan and then determines its level of information revelation. With a constant clearance discount rate, we derive pure strategy equilibria that are subgame perfect and demonstrate that complete information sharing is the unique Nash equilibrium for the game when the common demand is volatile and that no information revelation is the unique Nash equilibrium when demand is not volatile. Furthermore, we show that the Nash equilibrium is the same with a decreasing clearance discount rate and that neither complete information revelation nor zero information revelation is consistent with an equilibrium with an increasing discount rate. Results are similar in a duopoly non-homogeneous product market scenario.