29,779 research outputs found
Cost of Services and Incentives in the UK Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) Demonstration: Preliminary Analysis
This report presents a preliminary analysis of the cost of operating Britain's Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) demonstration, which is being evaluated though a large-scale randomised control trial. This assessment of costs will become an important element of the full cost-benefit analysis to be presented in future ERA reports. Aimed at helping low-income individuals sustain employment and progress in work, ERA is distinguished by a combination of job coaching and financial incentives that it offers to participants once they are working. The ERA demonstration project began operations in late 2003 as a pilot programme administered by Jobcentre Plus in six regions of the country
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Cost of saving natural gas through efficiency programs funded by utility customers: 2012–2017
This study estimates the cost of saving a therm of natural gas from energy efficiency programs funded by utility customers during the period 2012 to 2017. Berkeley Lab researchers compiled and analyzed efficiency program data reported by investor-owned utilities and other program administrators in a dozen states representative of the four U.S. Census regions — Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Utah. Depending on the year, the dataset accounts for about 50 percent to 70 percent of annual national spending on natural gas efficiency programs.
The estimated cost of saving natural gas during the study period is $0.40 per therm. The analysis also includes estimates of the program administrator cost of saved energy for three core sectors for natural gas: commercial and industrial, residential, and low-income households. It aggregates these sectors to provide regional and national values. Our metrics include savings-weighted averages, unweighted medians, and interquartile ranges (25th and 75th percentiles) of the levelized program administrator cost of saving gas, in constant 2017 dollars. In addition, the study analyzes cost trends during the study period, finding that average program costs trended downward.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office supported this work
Online Learning of Aggregate Knowledge about Non-linear Preferences Applied to Negotiating Prices and Bundles
In this paper, we consider a form of multi-issue negotiation where a shop
negotiates both the contents and the price of bundles of goods with his
customers. We present some key insights about, as well as a procedure for,
locating mutually beneficial alternatives to the bundle currently under
negotiation. The essence of our approach lies in combining aggregate
(anonymous) knowledge of customer preferences with current data about the
ongoing negotiation process. The developed procedure either works with already
obtained aggregate knowledge or, in the absence of such knowledge, learns the
relevant information online. We conduct computer experiments with simulated
customers that have_nonlinear_ preferences. We show how, for various types of
customers, with distinct negotiation heuristics, our procedure (with and
without the necessary aggregate knowledge) increases the speed with which deals
are reached, as well as the number and the Pareto efficiency of the deals
reached compared to a benchmark.Comment: 10 pages, 5 eps figures, ACM Proceedings documentclass, Published in
"Proc. 6th Int'l Conf. on Electronic Commerce ICEC04, Delft, The
Netherlands," M. Janssen, H. Sol, R. Wagenaar (eds.). ACM Pres
Dynamic Arrival Rate Estimation for Campus Mobility on Demand Network Graphs
Mobility On Demand (MOD) systems are revolutionizing transportation in urban
settings by improving vehicle utilization and reducing parking congestion. A
key factor in the success of an MOD system is the ability to measure and
respond to real-time customer arrival data. Real time traffic arrival rate data
is traditionally difficult to obtain due to the need to install fixed sensors
throughout the MOD network. This paper presents a framework for measuring
pedestrian traffic arrival rates using sensors onboard the vehicles that make
up the MOD fleet. A novel distributed fusion algorithm is presented which
combines onboard LIDAR and camera sensor measurements to detect trajectories of
pedestrians with a 90% detection hit rate with 1.5 false positives per minute.
A novel moving observer method is introduced to estimate pedestrian arrival
rates from pedestrian trajectories collected from mobile sensors. The moving
observer method is evaluated in both simulation and hardware and is shown to
achieve arrival rate estimates comparable to those that would be obtained with
multiple stationary sensors.Comment: Appears in 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS).
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7759357
Value Allocation in Regional Shopping Centers
Understanding consumer shopping patterns is essential in estimating the value of regional shopping centers. Consumer shopping behavior determines retail sales at regional shopping centers which, in turn, impacts shopping center rents and value. This article quantifies the effects of consumer shopping behavior on nonanchor tenant sales in regional shopping centers. The results of this study reveal that the effects of location, comparison shopping, and department store image are important in estimating shopping center patronage and retail sales. They also indicate that the value of a mall can be allocated to real estate and non-real estate value
How do banks make money? the fallacies of fee income
In the first of two articles in this issue, the authors document the increasing importance of noninterest income at U.S. commercial banking companies and address two fundamental misunderstandings regarding this trend: the belief that fee-based activities provide more stable earnings than interest-based income and the belief that fee income flows chiefly from nontraditional, nonbanking activities.Income ; Money ; Payment systems
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