05011 Abstracts Collection -- Computing and Markets

From 03.01.05 to 07.01.05, the Dagstuhl Seminar 05011``Computing and Markets\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Coordination in Service Value Networks - A Mechanism Design Approach

The fundamental paradigm shift from traditional value chains to agile service value networks (SVN) implies new economic and organizational challenges. This work provides an auction-based coordination mechanism that enables the allocation and pricing of service compositions in SVNs. The mechanism is multidimensional incentive compatible and implements an ex-post service level enforcement. Further extensions of the mechanism are evaluated following analytical and numerical research methods

Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility: Evidence from Two Communities in Pakistan

This report contributes to the Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility project by examining the impact of food price volatility on poor and vulnerable households through qualitative research conducted in 2012 and 2013 at ‘listening posts’ in a rural and urban area of Pakistan. While food prices are high in relation to the purchasing power of the poor, price volatility has remained in check. This is partly due to policies for preventing shortages and price spirals which were put in place following the crisis period of 2007-09. Idiosyncratic shocks rather than price changes are conspicuous sources of food insecurity for poor households. Our study finds that the poor and vulnerable face short periods of hunger but prolonged hunger is prevented by informal mechanisms of support that operate through the ‘food economy’. While formal systems in the form of cash transfers and government employment are considered significant sources of support, the government is not considered as a guarantor of food security by the poor. We find that the ‘future farmers’ hypothesis does not hold true for Pakistan as increases in output prices have not changed attitudes of young people towards farming

Essays in Mechanism Design

This thesis addresses problems in the area of mechanism design. In many settings in winch collective decisions are made, individuals' actual preferences are not publicly observable. As a result, individuals should be relied on to reveal this information. We are interested in an important application of mechanism design, which is the construction of desirable procedures for deciding upon resource allocation or task assignment. We make two main contributions. First, we propose a new mechanism for allocating a divisible commodity between a number of buyers efficiently and fairly. Buyers are assumed to behave as price-anticipators rather than as price-takers. The proposed mechanism is as parsimonious as possible, in the sense that it requires participants to report a one-dimensional message (scalar strategy) instead of an entire utility function, as required by Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms. We show that this mechanism yields efficient allocations in Nash equilibria and moreover, that these equilibria are envy-free. Additionally, we present distinct results that this mechanism is the only simple scalar strategy mechanism that both implements efficient Nash equilibria and satisfies the no envy axiom of fairness. The mechanism's Nash equilibria are proven to satisfy the fairness properties of both Ranking and Voluntary Participation. Our second contribution is to develop optimal VCG mechanisms in order to assign identical economic "bads" (for example, costly tasks) to agents. An optimal VCG mechanism minimizes the largest ratio of budget imbalance to efficient surplus over all cost profiles. The optimal non-deficit VCG mechanism achieves asymptotic budget balance, yet the non-deficit requirement is incompatible with reasonable welfare bounds. If we omit the non-deficit requirement, individual rationality greatly changes the behavior of surplus loss and deficit loss. Allowing a slight deficit, the optimal individually rational VCG mechanism becomes asymptotically budget balanced. Such a phenomenon cannot be found in the case of assigning economic "goods.

The future of animal feeding: towards sustainable precision livestock farming

In the future, production will increasingly be affected by globalization of the trade in feed commodities and livestock products, competition for natural resources, particularly land and water, competition between feed, food and biofuel, and by the need to operate in a carbonconstrained economy, says Nutreco’s Dr. Leo den Hartog. Moreover, he suggests, livestock production will be increasingly affected by consumer and societal concerns and legislation. A way forward in the development of profi table modern pig production will be the concept of sustainable precision livestock farming, den Hartog believes. This aims to integrate the technological approach of precision livestock farming with the social and ecological aspects. Optimization of productivity and effi ciency will play a crucial role, as well as maximization of the profi t for all stakeholders in the pork chain, he says. He discusses the necessity for and rationale behind the concept, with a special focus on animal feedin

Advances on a methodology of design and engineering in economics and political science

This thesis consists of five chapters: 1.The Mechanical View, 2.Social Machines, 3.The FCC Auction Machine, 4.Self-Interested Knaves, and 5.Self-Interested but Sympathetic. In the first three chapters, I advance a methodological account of current design and engineering in economics and political science, which I call methodological mechanicism. It is not ontological or literal; it relies on a technological metaphor by describing market and state institutions as machines, and the human mind as consisting of a number of mechanisms. I introduce the Mechanical view on scientific theories as distinct from the Syntactic and the Semantic views. The electromagnetic theories from the nineteenth century are used to illustrate this view as well as the use of minimal and maximal analogies in model-building in normal and revolutionary science. The Mechanical view is extended to the social sciences, particularly to mechanism design theory and institutional design, using the International Monetary Fund, the NHS internal markets and the FCC auction as examples. Their blueprints are evaluated using criteria such as shielding and power for calculating joint effects as well as libertarian, dirigiste, egalitarian and inegalitarian properties; and the holistic and piecemeal engineering they adopt. Experimental parameter variation is introduced as a method complementing design. Any design assumes a particular moral psychology, so in chapters four and five I argue that the moral psychology of universal self-interest from Bernard Mandeville, and the related ideas on design and engineering, should be chosen over the moral psychology of self-interest, sympathy and sentiments of humanity from David Hume. Hume finds no solution for knavery in politics and civil society. He accepts egalitarianism as useful and consistent with utilitarian principles; however he rejects it because of some difficulties with its implementation. I show how those difficulties may be overcome, and I explain why his objections are unbalanced and not sufficiently justified

Dynamic load-balancing of Stream It cluster computations

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-147).This thesis discusses the design and implementation of a dynamic load-balancing mechanism for computationally distributed programs running on a cluster written in the StreamIt programming language. StreamIt is useful for streaming data applications such as MPEG codecs. The structure of the language carries a lot of static information, such as data rates and computational hierarchy, and therefore lends itself well to parallelization. This work details a simulator for StreamIt cluster computations used to measure metrics such as throughput. Built on top of this simulation is an agent-based market used for load balancing the computation at StreamIt check-points to adapt to exogenously changing loads on the nodes of the cluster. The market models the structure of the computation as a supply chain. Our experiments study the throughput produced by the market compared to other policies, as well as qualitative features such as stability.by Eric Todd Fellheimer.M.Eng

Monetary Policy Processes in Postcommunist Romania

This thesis has a twofold aim. It first argues that monetary policy is inherently political because it involves struggles over meaning. It modifies Niebyl’s (1946) conceptual approach with an explicit attention to meaning, advancing a theory/ policy discourse/institutional practices nexus for exploring central banking. It shows that the emergence of leading representations of monetary processes (in Ricardo, Keynes and Friedman) involved discursive struggles during periods of crisis to assign meaning to problems and establish dominant interpretations. Politics and power were not grafted onto policy but were ontologically constitutive of it, shaping specific institutional configurations and practices. Second, this conceptualization is taken to a case study: a critical scrutiny of the role played by the central bank of Romania (NBR) in the reconstitution of the postcommunist Romanian economy as neoliberal economy from 1990 to 2008. The thesis asks what does the central bank do when the state, defined through its central planning legacy, ‘retreats’ from the market? The usual account explains policy success as direct result of commitments to neoliberal (monetarist) principles prescribed by international policy advice. Before 1997, neocommunist governments politically validated a communist legacy: soft budget constraints in the (state) productive sector. Politicized monetary policy decisions produced repeated crises. Afterwards, neoliberal governments gradually institutionalized an autonomous economic sphere, allowing an objective formulation and implementation of stability-orientated monetarist policies. The thesis challenges this orthodoxy. It argues against the attempts to erase politics from monetary policy processes that the above account articulates. Instead, drawing on critical conceptualizations of neoliberalism in its shifting forms, the period under analysis will be (re)interpreted as an ongoing process of neoliberalization, with the central bank an important actor in it. Indeed, the narration of crises identified the NBR as an essential instrument of institutional change and neoliberal ‘policy-making’. Monetarist narratives (ideologically) legitimized neoliberalism and effectively enacted neoliberal principles of monetary governance in the central bank. Thus, before 1997, the central bank functioned as a key vehicle of the neoliberal attack on the state’s capacity to craft economic reform. Since neoliberal institutions (also) take time to build, expanding policy repertoires outside the monetarist range invested the central bank with increasing powers to respond to structural and institutional resistance to neoliberal logics, arising from both communist legacies and ongoing political struggles. After 1997, the central bank’s rationality gradually changed to a constructive phase, normalizing an extralocal mode of economic governance whose distinguishing features will be identified. Institutional practices reconstructed the relationship between money, foreign exchange and treasury markets, subjugating liquidity management to the requirements of financialized accumulation. With financial stability increasingly tied into transnational actors’ choices, the NBR adopted inflation targeting. Nevertheless, inflation-targeting’s promise of stability operated to sideline the destabilizing nature of normalized neoliberal practices of monetary management, clearly evoked by the 2008 crisis. The thesis concludes with policy implications and an agenda for future research