The Economic Impact of Non-Compliance in the Carbon-Offset Market

Carbon offset markets have been suggested as a cost effective means of reducing GHG emissions. This paper develops a model of heterogeneous emitters and producers to examine the consequences of non-compliance on the performance of the carbon-offset market. The analysis begins with the derivation of demand and supply curves for carbon offsets based on perfect compliance. The paper then considers the impact of non-compliance by producers on the supply of carbon offsets. Results show that the extent of producers' non-compliance decreases with an increase in the audit probability and/or an increase in the penalty per unit of non-compliance. In addition, the number of producers participating in the carbon offsets market is shown to increase with an increase in the carbon-offset price. Based on the supply and demand curves, the analysis then considers the price and the quantity traded that are established by private firms that are engaged in carbon offset trading. The key role of the traders is to guarantee, based on the amount of monitoring that is undertaken, that the emitters purchase only carbon offsets that actually correspond to sequestered carbon. Both an oligopolistic and a monopolistic trading sector structure are considered. The analysis then examines two different organizational structures for the group that monitors producer compliance a group owned by the firms and a government-run agency. The results of the analysis show that both monitoring groups always undertake sufficient monitoring to ensure that full compliance is achieved thus, while non-compliance is possible, it does not occur in equilibrium. Since the level of monitoring effectively determines the amount of carbon that is sequestered and that can be traded, a monitoring group owned by the traders can achieve monopoly profits for the sector, even when it is oligopolistic. Although the formation of a government monitoring agency can potentially increase traded output and lower the price paid by emitters, these changes are likely to be small, particularly when the trading sector is monopolistic.Environmental Economics and Policy,

UG^2: a Video Benchmark for Assessing the Impact of Image Restoration and Enhancement on Automatic Visual Recognition

Advances in image restoration and enhancement techniques have led to discussion about how such algorithmscan be applied as a pre-processing step to improve automatic visual recognition. In principle, techniques like deblurring and super-resolution should yield improvements by de-emphasizing noise and increasing signal in an input image. But the historically divergent goals of the computational photography and visual recognition communities have created a significant need for more work in this direction. To facilitate new research, we introduce a new benchmark dataset called UG^2, which contains three difficult real-world scenarios: uncontrolled videos taken by UAVs and manned gliders, as well as controlled videos taken on the ground. Over 160,000 annotated frames forhundreds of ImageNet classes are available, which are used for baseline experiments that assess the impact of known and unknown image artifacts and other conditions on common deep learning-based object classification approaches. Further, current image restoration and enhancement techniques are evaluated by determining whether or not theyimprove baseline classification performance. Results showthat there is plenty of room for algorithmic innovation, making this dataset a useful tool going forward.Comment: Supplemental material: https://goo.gl/vVM1xe, Dataset: https://goo.gl/AjA6En, CVPR 2018 Prize Challenge: ug2challenge.or

Coalition Strategies and Reduction of GHG Emissions

The Flexible Mechanisms articulated in the Kyoto Protocol provide a robust framework for emission reduction issue in a manner that is not just economically efficient, but is also pro-growth for trade. In the presence of liquid or illiquid markets, to attain higher value from the emission trading, we have shown that coalition strategies provide a pertinent alternative to production optimization measures which may not be feasible at times. The whole game is analyzed taking a resource based view of the strategic factor markets. We have also illustrated the measures needed to provide stability to the coalitions and hence the coalition strategies.coalition, strategy, game theory, emission, environment, resource based view, strategic factor market

Introducing risk management into the grid

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are explicit statements about all expectations and obligations in the business partnership between customers and providers. They have been introduced in Grid computing to overcome the best effort approach, making the Grid more interesting for commercial applications. However, decisions on negotiation and system management still rely on static approaches, not reflecting the risk linked with decisions. The EC-funded project "AssessGrid" aims at introducing risk assessment and management as a novel decision paradigm into Grid computing. This paper gives a general motivation for risk management and presents the envisaged architecture of a "risk-aware" Grid middleware and Grid fabric, highlighting its functionality by means of three showcase scenarios

Dynamic bandwidth allocation in ATM networks

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis investigates bandwidth allocation methodologies to transport new emerging bursty traffic types in ATM networks. However, existing ATM traffic management solutions are not readily able to handle the inevitable problem of congestion as result of the bursty traffic from the new emerging services. This research basically addresses bandwidth allocation issues for bursty traffic by proposing and exploring the concept of dynamic bandwidth allocation and comparing it to the traditional static bandwidth allocation schemes