OM-BP-0024: Assure Adequate Economic Incentives and Contractual Arrangements for Federation Actors

Best Practice

Assure adequate economic incentives and contractual arrangements for all participants to an identity federation system to manage liability and sustain adequate reliability, security, and privacy requirements.

Rationale

An identity federation system is a two-sided market that yields dominant platforms because of economic network effects. For example, if IdPs are in competition to get to the market first by attracting users quickly and benefit from network effects, ease of use will be given higher priority than privacy, reliability, or security which may bring these down (Landau and Moore, 2012). This special characteristic of identity federation systems justifies special diligence to mitigate the negative effects of imbalanced economic incentives.

Bad Practices

• Implement federations without proper analysis of economic incentives.

Implementation Details

• Analyze and design the identity federation system to embed adequate economic incentives for all actors.

• Assure adequate contractual arrangements between federation participants to manage liability.

Quotes

Bibliography

• Landau and Moore, 2012

Related Best Practices

• Orphan Accounts Cleaning

See Also