Competing Complements

In Cournot's model of complements, the producers of A and B are both monopolists. This paper extends Cournot's model to allow for competition between complements on one side of the market. Consider two complements, A and B, where the A + B bundle is valuable only when purchased together. Good A is supplied by a monopolist (e.g., Microsoft) and there is competition in the B goods from vertically differentiated suppliers (e.g., Intel and AMD). In this simple game, there may not be a pure-strategy equilibria. In the standard case where marginal costs are weakly positive, there is no pure strategy where the lower quality B firm obtains positive market share. We also consider the case where A has negative marginal costs, as would arise when A can expect to make upgrade sales to an installed base. When profits from the installed base are sufficiently large, a pure strategy equilibrium exists with two B firms active in the market. Although there is competition in the complement market, the monopoly Firm A may earn lower profits in this environment. Consequently, A may prefer to accept lower future profits in order to interact with a monopolist complement in B

Performance study of synthetic AER generation on CPUs for Real-Time Video based on Spikes

Address-Event-Representation (AER) is a neuromorphic interchip communication protocol that allows for real-time virtual massive connectivity between huge number neurons located on different chips. When building multi-chip muti-layered AER systems it is absolutely necessary to have a computer interface that allows (a) to read AER interchip traffic into the computer and visualize it on screen, and (b) convert conventional frame-based video stream in the computer into AER and inject it at some point of the AER structure. This is necessary for test and debugging of complex AER systems. Previous work presented several software methods for converting digital frames into AER format. Those methods were not feasible for real-time conversion those days because the processor performance was insufficient. Nowadays, Multi-core processor architectures and cache hierarchies have evolved and the performance is much better than Pentium 4 Mobile of those years. In this paper we study frame-to-AER methods for realtime video applications (40ms per frame) using modern processor architectures, compilers, and processors oriented for stand-alone applications (mini-PC processors

Competing Complements

In Cournot's model of complements, the producers of A and B are both monopolists. This paper extends Cournot's model to allow for competition between complements on one side of the market. Consider two complements, A and B, where the A + B bundle is valuable only when purchased together. Good A is supplied by a monopolist (e.g., Microsoft) and there is competition in the B goods from vertically differentiated suppliers (e.g., Intel and AMD). In this simple game, there may not be a pure-strategy equilibria. In the standard case where marginal costs are weakly positive, there is no pure strategy where the lower quality B firm obtains positive market share. We also consider the case where A has negative marginal costs, as would arise when A can expect to make upgrade sales to an installed base. When profits from the installed base are sufficiently large, a pure strategy equilibrium exists with two B firms active in the market. Although there is competition in the complement market, the monopoly Firm A may earn lower profits in this environment. Consequently, A may prefer to accept lower future profits in order to interact with a monopolist complement in B