Assessing the Impact of Game Day Schedule and Opponents on Travel Patterns and Route Choice using Big Data Analytics

The transportation system is crucial for transferring people and goods from point A to point B. However, its reliability can be decreased by unanticipated congestion resulting from planned special events. For example, sporting events collect large crowds of people at specific venues on game days and disrupt normal traffic patterns. The goal of this study was to understand issues related to road traffic management during major sporting events by using widely available INRIX data to compare travel patterns and behaviors on game days against those on normal days. A comprehensive analysis was conducted on the impact of all Nebraska Cornhuskers football games over five years on traffic congestion on five major routes in Nebraska. We attempted to identify hotspots, the unusually high-risk zones in a spatiotemporal space containing traffic congestion that occur on almost all game days. For hotspot detection, we utilized a method called Multi-EigenSpot, which is able to detect multiple hotspots in a spatiotemporal space. With this algorithm, we were able to detect traffic hotspot clusters on the five chosen routes in Nebraska. After detecting the hotspots, we identified the factors affecting the sizes of hotspots and other parameters. The start time of the game and the Cornhuskers’ opponent for a given game are two important factors affecting the number of people coming to Lincoln, Nebraska, on game days. Finally, the Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN) approach was applied to forecast the start times and locations of hotspot clusters in 2018 with a weighted mean absolute percentage error (WMAPE) of 13.8%

Behavioral and Network Origins of Wealth Inequality: Insights from a Virtual World

Almost universally, wealth is not distributed uniformly within societies or economies. Even though wealth data have been collected in various forms for centuries, the origins for the observed wealth-disparity and social inequality are not yet fully understood. Especially the impact and connections of human behavior on wealth could so far not be inferred from data. Here we study wealth data from the virtual economy of the massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) Pardus. This data not only contains every player's wealth at every point in time, but also all actions of every player over a timespan of almost a decade. We find that wealth distributions in the virtual world are very similar to those in western countries. In particular we find an approximate exponential for low wealth and a power-law tail. The Gini index is found to be $g=0.65$, which is close to the indices of many Western countries. We find that wealth-increase rates depend on the time when players entered the game. Players that entered the game early on tend to have remarkably higher wealth-increase rates than those who joined later. Studying the players' positions within their social networks, we find that the local position in the trade network is most relevant for wealth. Wealthy people have high in- and out-degree in the trade network, relatively low nearest-neighbor degree and a low clustering coefficient. Wealthy players have many mutual friendships and are socially well respected by others, but spend more time on business than on socializing. We find that players that are not organized within social groups with at least three members are significantly poorer on average. We observe that high `political' status and high wealth go hand in hand. Wealthy players have few personal enemies, but show animosity towards players that behave as public enemies.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, 8 pages S

Auctions for private congestible infrastructures

This paper investigates regulation by auctions of private supply of congestible infrastructures in two networks settings: 1) two serial facilities, where the consumer has to use both in order to consume; and 2) two parallel facilities that are imperfect substitutes. There are four market structures: a monopoly and 3 duopolies that differ in how firms interact. The effects of an auction depend on what the bidders compete. With a bid auction, the bidders compete on how much money they transfer to the government. This auction leads to the same outcome as the unregulated game (for a given market structure), since this gives the maximum profit to transfer. An auction on the capacity of a facility leads to an even lower welfare than no regulation, because firms set very high capacities and usage fees. Conversely, an auction on generalised price or number of users leads to the first-best outcome. Moreover, these two auctions are robust: they attain the first-best regardless of whether the facilities are auctioned off to a single firm or to two firms, and for all market and network structures. On the contrary, the performances (relative to the first-best) of the bid and capacity auctions strongly depend on these considerations

Sports industry research North America: USA & Canada

The Sports Industry is a potential business that not only involves the game at the field. It includes different aspects like food & beverage, apparel, sponsorship, licensing, events, tourism, and infrastructure (ATKearney, 2011). In North America this industry is one of the most important in terms of creating a positive impact to the economy, increasing surprisingly fast the GDP of the United States and Canada. The United States and Canada are the world’s biggest sports nations that provide a wide range of sport facilities and infrastructure and hosts yearly enigmatic events in key cities like Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Toronto. For this reason, we identified that these countries are a strategic move for any sports-related company to keep growing within the Sports Industry. The current report aims to provide a comprehensive research about the Sports Industry in North America, describing and analyzing possible investment opportunities in these countries for the upcoming years. The document is structured to explain an I) Overview of The Sports Industry in the United States and Canada, including the main sports leagues, secondary sports, sport facilities and new technology and trends. Then, we will discuss about the II) Main Leagues in North America considering its main teams, athletes, events, and highlight sport cases. Finally, we will describe the III) Sports Media Industry in North America, explaining about the Print, TV, Radio, Online channels and current media trends

A Survey on Approximation Mechanism Design without Money for Facility Games

In a facility game one or more facilities are placed in a metric space to serve a set of selfish agents whose addresses are their private information. In a classical facility game, each agent wants to be as close to a facility as possible, and the cost of an agent can be defined as the distance between her location and the closest facility. In an obnoxious facility game, each agent wants to be far away from all facilities, and her utility is the distance from her location to the facility set. The objective of each agent is to minimize her cost or maximize her utility. An agent may lie if, by doing so, more benefit can be obtained. We are interested in social choice mechanisms that do not utilize payments. The game designer aims at a mechanism that is strategy-proof, in the sense that any agent cannot benefit by misreporting her address, or, even better, group strategy-proof, in the sense that any coalition of agents cannot all benefit by lying. Meanwhile, it is desirable to have the mechanism to be approximately optimal with respect to a chosen objective function. Several models for such approximation mechanism design without money for facility games have been proposed. In this paper we briefly review these models and related results for both deterministic and randomized mechanisms, and meanwhile we present a general framework for approximation mechanism design without money for facility games

Emergent multimedia clusters in the Lille, Lyon and Marseille metropolitan areas

The spatial, organizational and institutional proximity plays an important part in the geography of economic development (Boschma, 2005). It is therefore important to see what kinds of networks are being developed within the multimédia sector between the different actors of the Triple Helix (Etzkowitz and Leydersdorff, 1997): firms, training and R&D facilities, and public authorities. We will take for the example three French metropolitan areas: Lille, Lyon and Marseille. The dynamism of the social networks is supported by the development of a collective governance which associates public and private actors (Maillat and Kébir, 1999). So, initiatives have launched to facilitate strategic governance of emergent regional multimédia clusters. Three forms of governance (Tremblay and Rousseau, 2005) can be distinguished: public (Pole Images Nord-Pas-de-Calais in Lille), private (Imaginove in Lyon) and public-private partnership (Pole Sud Image in Marseille). These contrasted situations result from internal conflicts in the different industries of the multimedia sector. These structures have launched several similar actions in order to the constitution of social networks. Principles are inspired by the Competitivness Clusters and Michael Porter’s theories (2000). We can summarize them in the following way: - Interprofessional meetings, - Pooling of the human resources of the companies from the cluster, - Training programme for employees and executives, - Calls for collaborative projects which associate industrial and academic partners, - Support to firms willing to try out innovative business approaches, - Support programme for companies seeking to compete internationally. But, collaboration between different firms was generally low or nonexistent in spite of several regional projects (Einright, 1996). Collaborations are still very recent, rarely include a cross-media approach and hesitate to develop partnerships with research units. Similarly, the three metropolitan areas suffer from the poor adaptation of the regional training offer, which is far too rich and diverse compared to the actual capacities of the regional moving picture economy. Companies, mainly SMEs, cannot hire many people and they hesitate to embark on international missions.

Multi-Layer Cyber-Physical Security and Resilience for Smart Grid

The smart grid is a large-scale complex system that integrates communication technologies with the physical layer operation of the energy systems. Security and resilience mechanisms by design are important to provide guarantee operations for the system. This chapter provides a layered perspective of the smart grid security and discusses game and decision theory as a tool to model the interactions among system components and the interaction between attackers and the system. We discuss game-theoretic applications and challenges in the design of cross-layer robust and resilient controller, secure network routing protocol at the data communication and networking layers, and the challenges of the information security at the management layer of the grid. The chapter will discuss the future directions of using game-theoretic tools in addressing multi-layer security issues in the smart grid.Comment: 16 page

Structural Separation and Access in Telecommunications Markets

This paper presents a basic framework to assess whether structural (vertical) separation is desirable. It is discussed within the setting of fixed telecommunications markets. From an economist’s perspective, the key question that underlies the case for structural separation is: is there a persistent bottleneck? The obvious candidate is the ‘local loop’, or local access network. If yes then it makes sense to compare the costs and benefits of structural separation. The framework provides a set of options that the regulator can use strategically, by using the threat of a break-up to influence an incumbent’s competitive stance in the wholesale market.