Exogenous coalition formation in the e-marketplace based on geographical proximity

This paper considers a model for exogenous coalition formation in e-marketplaces. Using the informational advantage e-retailer creates coalitions of customers based on geographical proximity. Most of the literature regards this process as endogenous: a coalition leader bundles eventual purchases together in order to obtain a better bargaining position. In contrast - and in response to what is being observed in business practice - we analyse a situation in which an existing e-retailer exogenously forms customers' coalitions. Results of this study are highly encouraging. Namely, we demonstrate that even under highly imperfect warehouse management schemes leading to contagion eects, suggested combined delivery service may oer signifficant efficiency gains as well as opportunities for Pareto-improvement.Coalition formation, e-commerce, multi-agent systems, consumer satisfaction, demand planning, warehouse management.

Emergence of Social Punishment and Cooperation through Prior Commitments

Social punishment, whereby cooperators punish defectors, has been suggested as an important mechanism that promotes the emergence of cooperation or maintenance of social norms in the context of the one-shot (i.e. non-repeated) interaction. However, whenever antisocial punishment, whereby defectors punish cooperators, is available, this antisocial behavior outperforms social punishment, leading to the destruction of cooperation. In this paper, we use evolutionary game theory to show that this antisocial behavior can be efficiently restrained by relying on prior commitments, wherein agents can arrange, prior to an interaction, agreements regarding posterior compensation by those who dishonor the agreements. We show that, although the commitment mechanism by itself can guarantee a notable level of cooperation, a significantly higher level is achieved when both mechanisms, those of proposing prior commitments and of punishment, are available in co-presence. Interestingly, social punishment prevails and dominates in this system as it can take advantage of the commitment mechanism to cope with antisocial behaviors. That is, establishment of a commitment system helps to pave the way for the evolution of social punishment and abundant cooperation, even in the presence of antisocial punishment

The Adoption of e-commerce in SMEs: An Empirical Investigation in Egypt

The Adoption of E-commerce in SMEs: An Empirical Investigation in Egypt It is recognised widely that e-commerce can offer substantial opportunities for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to compete in the global market. In developing countries, e-commerce opportunities can be a meaningful approach for SMEs to be able to compete with large businesses and to access, with lowest possible costs, international markets. However, the current situation shows that SMEs continue to lag behind in maximising their capabilities in taking these chances. Universally, they are reported to be slow adopters of new technologies as a result of limited financial resources and lack of expertise. The importance, of SMEs, emerged from their positions since they contributed more than 90% to many developed or developing countries’ economies and they were considered to be the backbone of any economy. Hence, the main purpose, of conducting this research, was to increase the body of knowledge about the process of the adoption of e-commerce. This was done by a primary empirical focus on small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Egypt. SMEs represented about 90% of all Egyptian businesses (ITP, 2012). This study aimed to investigate the factors which could influence the SMEs’ adoption of e-commerce. In order to accomplish this objective, the researcher investigated the previous studies, on the same approach, in order to identify the gap, within the literature, regarding the adoption of e-commerce amongst SMEs. Additionally, the researcher integrated existing theories on the adoption of innovation in order to develop a conceptual framework for the determinants of the adoption of e-commerce in the SMEs sector. The researcher reviewed the Diffusion of Innovation (DOI); Resource Based View of the Firm (RBV); Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) Model; and Technology Acceptance Models (TAM) to give constructive information about the firm and decision makers, within the firm, who were believed to have an impact on the adoption of innovation. 3 The proposed model was tested using quantitative research data. The data was collected by means of an online questionnaire survey and, subsequently, due to the high rate of non-respondents, changed to a face-to-face survey. A total of 130 usable responses were generated for purpose of analysis. The study contributed to the existing research by providing valuable information about the factors which influenced the SMEs’ adoption of e-commerce. As the results showed, there were 6 groups of factors which impacted mainly on the adoption processes. Namely, these were: Decision maker characteristics (education level, position within the firm, management support, management attitude); organisational characteristics (firm activity, firm size, firm’s assets/capital, firm age, employee’s IT knowledge, firm marketing capability); innovation characteristics (Perceived Relative Advantage); e-readiness (Individual and organisation e-readiness); government support; and barriers to e-commerce. This study’s findings offered important information for Egyptian government, policy makers and managerial participants; those were the people who encouraged the Egyptian SMEs to adopt e-commerce. These findings could be generalised to be applied to other countries with similar conditions to Egypt, as well as being applicable to Egyptian SMEs in other sectors

A Game-Theoretic Approach to Strategic Resource Allocation Mechanisms in Edge and Fog Computing

With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT), cloud-centric application management raises questions related to quality of service for real-time applications. Fog and edge computing (FEC) provide a complement to the cloud by filling the gap between cloud and IoT. Resource management on multiple resources from distributed and administrative FEC nodes is a key challenge to ensure the quality of end-user’s experience. To improve resource utilisation and system performance, researchers have been proposed many fair allocation mechanisms for resource management. Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF), a resource allocation policy for multiple resource types, meets most of the required fair allocation characteristics. However, DRF is suitable for centralised resource allocation without considering the effects (or feedbacks) of large-scale distributed environments like multi-controller software defined networking (SDN). Nash bargaining from micro-economic theory or competitive equilibrium equal incomes (CEEI) are well suited to solving dynamic optimisation problems proposing to ‘proportionately’ share resources among distributed participants. Although CEEI’s decentralised policy guarantees load balancing for performance isolation, they are not faultproof for computation offloading. The thesis aims to propose a hybrid and fair allocation mechanism for rejuvenation of decentralised SDN controller deployment. We apply multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with robustness against adversarial controllers to enable efficient priority scheduling for FEC. Motivated by software cybernetics and homeostasis, weighted DRF is generalised by applying the principles of feedback (positive or/and negative network effects) in reverse game theory (GT) to design hybrid scheduling schemes for joint multi-resource and multitask offloading/forwarding in FEC environments. In the first piece of study, monotonic scheduling for joint offloading at the federated edge is addressed by proposing truthful mechanism (algorithmic) to neutralise harmful negative and positive distributive bargain externalities respectively. The IP-DRF scheme is a MARL approach applying partition form game (PFG) to guarantee second-best Pareto optimality viii | P a g e (SBPO) in allocation of multi-resources from deterministic policy in both population and resource non-monotonicity settings. In the second study, we propose DFog-DRF scheme to address truthful fog scheduling with bottleneck fairness in fault-probable wireless hierarchical networks by applying constrained coalition formation (CCF) games to implement MARL. The multi-objective optimisation problem for fog throughput maximisation is solved via a constraint dimensionality reduction methodology using fairness constraints for efficient gateway and low-level controller’s placement. For evaluation, we develop an agent-based framework to implement fair allocation policies in distributed data centre environments. In empirical results, the deterministic policy of IP-DRF scheme provides SBPO and reduces the average execution and turnaround time by 19% and 11.52% as compared to the Nash bargaining or CEEI deterministic policy for 57,445 cloudlets in population non-monotonic settings. The processing cost of tasks shows significant improvement (6.89% and 9.03% for fixed and variable pricing) for the resource non-monotonic setting - using 38,000 cloudlets. The DFog-DRF scheme when benchmarked against asset fair (MIP) policy shows superior performance (less than 1% in time complexity) for up to 30 FEC nodes. Furthermore, empirical results using 210 mobiles and 420 applications prove the efficacy of our hybrid scheduling scheme for hierarchical clustering considering latency and network usage for throughput maximisation.Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi (Tetfund, Nigeria

Analyzing coalitions in wireless heterogeneous networks and their economic aspects

The massive investment that is essential to implement a large area wireless network is one of the significant roadblocks that stops service providers from offering more affordable data services. The fact that the fast evolution of wireless technologies requires frequent updates of hardware and software also leads to higher capital expenditure and operation costs for the providers and subsequently to more expensive data plans for the end users. The implementation of suboptimal pricing schemes in today’s wireless market, which does not consider service level agreements and forces users to pay for both network connectivity and data transfer, is another reason to decrease the overall satisfaction of subscribers. In view of these issues our objective in this thesis is to study the proper pricing methods based on the reality of current market as well as to consider alternative options that can reduce the service costs of wireless providers are our objectives. We study the volume-based pricing which is the dominant method in cellular networks nowadays. We derive the optimal data plan parameters such as the data volume cap, price, and data rate. Considering the cost-reduction possibilities, we prove that a coalition of providers in which they can serve users of each other is a valid alternative that reduces the implementation costs of network expansion. We build our analysis based on the cooperation between heterogeneous providers and we consider the heterogeneity in both technology and service aspects. We avoid the models which consider a coalition of all providers since it forms a monopoly and is prohibited by regulatory entities. Hence, we study models of coalitional structures that include several sets of providers. In this way, users have the option to select their data plan based on the service offered by a coalitional set of providers that can have different technologies in their access network. Concerning the service-oriented heterogeneous networks, we track the directions of payments from the content providers (CP) to the service providers (SP) and finally to the end users and try to modify it based on social fairness. To do so, we analyze several content types based on subscriber usage patterns and we find the ones that can be offered with a different pricing method without causing profit loss to CP or SP. Our goal is to set a coalitional framework between CP and SP that can lead to a free unlimited access to particular content types. We show that such agreements, if set correctly, can increase the profit of CP and SP. Throughout this thesis, the analytical models are verified with numerical examples that are designed to simulate the real world scenarios