8,000 research outputs found
A Grey-Box Approach to Automated Mechanism Design
Auctions play an important role in electronic commerce, and have been used to
solve problems in distributed computing. Automated approaches to designing
effective auction mechanisms are helpful in reducing the burden of traditional
game theoretic, analytic approaches and in searching through the large space of
possible auction mechanisms. This paper presents an approach to automated
mechanism design (AMD) in the domain of double auctions. We describe a novel
parametrized space of double auctions, and then introduce an evolutionary
search method that searches this space of parameters. The approach evaluates
auction mechanisms using the framework of the TAC Market Design Game and
relates the performance of the markets in that game to their constituent parts
using reinforcement learning. Experiments show that the strongest mechanisms we
found using this approach not only win the Market Design Game against known,
strong opponents, but also exhibit desirable economic properties when they run
in isolation.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, and 1 algorithm. Extended abstract to
appear in the proceedings of AAMAS'201
The river sharing problem: A review of the technical literature for policy economists
Water is essential for life. However, the basic problem of water resource allocation has been that water tends to be over-allocated. Demand for water exceeds the available supply. Essentially, the water economy is bankrupt. Bankruptcy problems have been almost exhaustively studied in the literature on economic theory-primarily from the perspective of cooperative game theory. The main concern of this literature has been how to fairly divide up the assets of a bankrupt entity. In water resource economics cooperative game theory has often been employed as a means of analyzing water resource allocation. It was only recently that the problem of directional flow was incorporated into such analyses. This has come to be known as the âriver sharing problemâ in the theoretical literature. Accounting for the direction of flow in water resource allocation problems has profound implications for policies that wish to facilitate both fair and efficient water allocations. This is the case whether proposed policies are interventionist or market based in nature. There is now a considerable literature on the allocation and distribution of water resources characterized by unidirectional flow. In this paper I critically review and appraise this literature with a view to making it more accessible to applied and policy economists. A key feature of the paper is that the connection between the bankruptcy literature, which has recently also realized the importance of flow, and the river sharing literature is discussed. The current state of the art in game theoretic models of water resource allocation with directional flow is discussed and implications and consequences for water resource policy highlightedRiver sharing problem, Bankruptcy, Cooperative game theory, Water resouyrce allocation, distributive justice
Spectrum Trading: An Abstracted Bibliography
This document contains a bibliographic list of major papers on spectrum
trading and their abstracts. The aim of the list is to offer researchers
entering this field a fast panorama of the current literature. The list is
continually updated on the webpage
\url{http://www.disp.uniroma2.it/users/naldi/Ricspt.html}. Omissions and papers
suggested for inclusion may be pointed out to the authors through e-mail
(\textit{[email protected]})
Optimal pricing for optimal transport
Suppose that is the cost of transporting a unit of mass from to and suppose that a mass distribution on is transported
optimally (so that the total cost of transportation is minimal) to the mass
distribution on . Then, roughly speaking, the Kantorovich duality
theorem asserts that there is a price for a unit of mass sold (say by
the producer to the distributor) at and a price for a unit of mass
sold (say by the distributor to the end consumer) at such that for any
and , the price difference is not greater than the
cost of transportation and such that there is equality
if indeed a nonzero mass was transported (via the optimal
transportation plan) from to . We consider the following optimal pricing
problem: suppose that a new pricing policy is to be determined while keeping a
part of the optimal transportation plan fixed and, in addition, some prices at
the sources of this part are also kept fixed. From the producers' side, what
would then be the highest compatible pricing policy possible? From the
consumers' side, what would then be the lowest compatible pricing policy
possible? In the framework of -convexity theory, we have recently introduced
and studied optimal -convex -antiderivatives and explicit constructions
of these optimizers were presented. In the present paper we employ optimal
-convex -antiderivatives and conclude that these are natural solutions to
the optimal pricing problems mentioned above. This type of problems drew
attention in the past and existence results were previously established in the
case where under various specifications. We solve the above problem
for general spaces and real-valued, lower semicontinuous cost functions
Trade and harmonization : if your institutions are good, does it matter if they are different ?
Good institutional quality (function) and similar institutional design (form) can promote international trade by reducing transactions costs. The authors evaluate the relative importance of function versus form in a gravity model, using an indicator of different legal systems as a proxy for differences in form, together with indicators of overall institutional quality. They find that good institutions promote trade much more than similar legal systems and have much more explanatory power. This effect is economically large-up to 10 times the effect of different legal systems. Moreover, better infrastructure matters as much as good institutions.Legal Products,Trade Law,Economic Theory&Research,Transport and Trade Logistics,Common Carriers Industry
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