The Abertay Code Bar – unlocking access to university-generated computer games intellectual poperty

Progress report on a digital platform and dual licensing model developed to unlock access to a University repository of new and legacy computer games based Intellectual Property (IP) assets for educational and commercial use. The digital creative industries have been identified by a number of governments as a priority area in delivering sustainable economic growth. Code Bar is an innovation that allows digital products to be commercially successful beyond the end of the Dare competition or coursework submission. To be selected for Code Bar, game products must be well designed for both player and market; technically robust (i.e. operating consistently and reliably on a single/multiple platforms), and be free from ambiguity around 3rd party IP. We describe various technical, pedagogic and legal challenges in developing the digital platform, licensing model and packaging of computer games products for release through the platform. The model is extendable beyond computer games to other software products

Emotions and cognitive workload in economic decision processes - A NeuroIS Approach

The influence of cognitive and emotions on decision processes have been recently highlighted. Emotions interplay with the process of cognition, and determine decision processes. In this work, the role of external and internal influences on economic decision processes are studied. A NeuroIS method is applied for measuring emotions and cognitive workload. The lack of a suitable experimental platform for performing NeuroIS studies was recognized and the platform Brownie was developed and evaluated

A Note on the Equivalence of Rationalizability Concepts in Generalized Nice Games

Moulin (1984) describes the class of nice games for which the solution concept of point-rationalizability coincides with iterated elimination of strongly dominated strategies. As a consequence nice games have the desirable property that all rationalizability concepts determine the same strategic solution. However, nice games are characterized by rather strong assumptions. For example, only single-valued best responses are admitted and the individual strategy sets have to be convex and compact subsets of the real line R1. This note shows that equivalence of all rationalizability concepts can be extended to multi-valued best response correspondences. The surprising finding is that equivalence does not hold for individual strategy sets that are compact and convex subsets of Rn with n>1.

Improving the Use of Experimental Auctions in Africa: Theory and Evidence

Experimental auctions have not been widely used in Africa. However, auctions are important tools for evaluating new products and technologies. To increase the quality of these experiments, we explore an alternative first-price bidding mechanism that is more similar to African market exchanges and we analyze factors likely to affect bidding. Experiments with African consumers show that the proposed first-price mechanism has no advantage over conventional second-price mechanisms. Results show high and significant cash-in-hand, experimenter, and time of day effects in main rounds, and significant ordering effects in test rounds. These effects need to be carefully considered when applying the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism in Africa.Africa, BDM mechanism, experimenter effect, first-price auction, income effect, order effect, time of day effect, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

An auction-based serious game for bug tracking

Today, one of the challenges in software engineering is utilizing application lifecycle management (ALM) tools effectively in software development. In particular, it is hard for software developers to engage with the work items that are appointed to themselves in these ALM tools. In this study, we have focused on bug tracking in ALM where one of the most important metrics is mean time to resolution that is the average time to fix a reported bug. To improve this metric, we developed a serious game application based on an auction-based reward mechanism. The ultimate aim of this approach is to create an incentive structure for software practitioners to find and resolved bugs that are auctioned where participants are encouraged to solve and test more bugs in less time and improve quality of software development in a competitive environment. We conduct hypothesis tests by performing a Monte Carlo simulation. The preliminary results of this research support the idea that using a gamification approach for an issue tracking system enhances the productivity and decreases mean time to resolution

Lawmakers as Job Buyers

In 2013, Washington State authorized the largest state tax incentive for private industry in U.S. history. It is not remarkable for a state legislature to use tax benefits to retain a major employer—in this case, the global aerospace manufacturer Boeing. Laws across all states and thousands of cities routinely incentivize companies such as Amazon to relocate or remain in particular areas. Notably, however, Washington did not recover any of the subsidies it authorized despite Boeing’s significant post-incentive workforce reductions. This story leads to several important questions: (1) How effective are state and local legislatures at influencing business-location decisions?; (2) Do such incentive programs actually achieve their goals of increasing and maintaining jobs?; (3) Is the public protected from imprudent spending? This Article looks specifically at the role of state and local governments in encouraging businesses to locate in their jurisdictions. In such cases, state and local lawmakers act as buyers of jobs. This Article argues for a two-step proposal to limit subnational government actions to incentivize business-location decisions. The first step involves a bidding process where companies are awarded incentives based on the lowest subsidy dollar amount required to create or retain a job of a certain quality or pay rate. The second step involves defining job metrics based on certain preconditions and recapturing incentives should a company fail to maintain or achieve a defined number of job and qualities inherent in each job. This two-step proposal has regulatory benefits and it mollifies the political concern for jurisdictions to appear competitive and the need for public financial protection

Platform Rules: Multi-Sided Platforms as Regulators

This paper provides a basic conceptual framework for interpreting non-price instruments used by multi-sided platforms (MSPs) by analogizing MSPs as "private regulators" who regulate access to and interactions around the platform. We present evidence on Facebook, TopCoder, Roppongi Hills and Harvard Business School to document the "regulatory" role played by MSPs. We find MSPs use nuanced combinations of legal, technological, informational and other instruments (including price-setting) to implement desired outcomes. Non-price instruments were very much at the core of MSP strategies.Platforms, regulation, network effects, distributed innovation