Aggregative games

This survey presents in a historical way the main contributions to the hardcore theory of aggregative games and the applications of this model to several fields of economics, other social sciences and engineering

Essays on the Demand-Side Management in Electricity Markets

This Ph.D. thesis focuses on the demand-side management in electricity markets and a new player in the market { an aggregator of exible demand. The thesis consists of three independent chapters investigating the entrance of this new player in the power markets from di erent angles: focusing on the aggregator, a large power consumer and a producer. The rst chapter, \Aggregation of demand-side exibility in electricity markets: the e ects of portfolio choice", analyses the performance of the aggregator depending on its portfolio choice. I have investigated several portfolios of di erent exibility sources: electrical vehi- cles, heat pumps and/or home appliances like washing machines, dryers and dish washers. I have used Nord Pool power market data for Denmark's bidding area DK2 to identify the e ects of the portfolio choice on the imbalance payments and compensations to consumers that provide exibility. The results show that di erent compositions of exibility sources lead to di erent imbalance payments and compensations to consumers. However, there is no signi cant additional value of having an access to all types of exibility sources unless there is a xed contract cost. This suggests that the aggregator would choose to specialise in cer- tain types of exibility sources. Also, I nd that the incentives for consumers to participate in demand-side management programs might be not su cient, since the compensation for the provided exibility is very low

Divisionalization, product cannibalization and product location choice: Evidence from the U.S. automobile industry

This study argues that a firm's product location choice may be a function of the firm's way of splitting the product market (i.e., divisionalization) and the concern for product cannibalization at the division and the firm levels. The focus of this study is at the division level and a division's new product location choice vis-à-vis its own products (intra-divisional new product distance), the products of a rival division of competing firms (inter-firm divisional new product distance), and the products of a sister division of the same firm (intra-firm divisional new product distance). The hypotheses were tested using data on the U.S. automobile industry between 1979 and 1999. The results show that a focal division with a high level of inter-firm divisional domain overlap with a rival division, relative to the focal division's own domain, is more likely to locate its new product (here new car model) closer to that rival's existing car models. And it was also found that divisional density affects a division's new product location choice. But this study didn't find any significant role of divisional status on new product location choice. And contrary to our expectation, the results of intra-firm divisional domain overlap and new product location choice suggest that inter-divisional product cannibalization might not be such an important concern when divisions introduce their new products, as we had originally expected. By addressing the firm's competitive engagement in the context of a division's new product location choice, this study expands the basic logic of market overlap at the firm level into the unit- or division-level, and highlights how a division's new product location choice is affected by intra-firm divisional structural relationship as well as interfirm divisional structural relationship. In so doing, this study hopes to contribute to the literature on divisionalization, new product location choice, competition at the unit-level, and product cannibalization, among others

Labor specialization, agglomeration economies, and regional resource allocation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1985.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCHBibliography: leaves 142-149.by Sunwoong Kim.Ph.D

Building Brave New Worlds: Science Fiction and Transition Design

The worldbuilding practices of science fiction authors have the potential to play a key role in society, given that they involve the design and depiction of complex, alternative realities set in the future. This potential is acknowledged by Transition Design — an emerging area of practice that melds futures-based narratives, foresight, and systems-thinking, amongst other disciplines. Transition Design goes beyond social innovation to envision radically new images of the future, and pathways towards more sustainable systemic states. To facilitate the design of and transition towards sustainable futures, this Major Research Paper introduces the Seven Foundations of Worldbuilding: a model that integrates a new superstructure of complex systems with backcasting methodology

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

Spatial competition of learning agents in agricultural procurement markets

Spatially dispersed farmers supply raw milk as the primary input to a small number of large dairy-processing firms. The spatial competition of processing firms has short- to long-term repercussions on farm and processor structure, as it determines the regional demand for raw milk and the resulting raw milk price. A number of recent analytical and empirical contributions in the literature analyse the spatial price competition of processing firms in milk markets. Agent-based models (ABMs) serve by now as computational laboratories in many social science and interdisciplinary fields and are recently also introduced as bottom-up approaches to help understand market outcomes emerging from autonomously deciding and interacting agents. Despite ABMs' strengths, the inclusion of interactive learning by intelligent agents is not sufficiently matured. Although the literature of multi-agent systems (MASs) and multi-agent economic simulation are related fields of research they have progressed along separate paths. This thesis takes us through some basic steps involved in developing a theoretical basis for designing multi-agent learning in spatial economic ABMs. Each of the three main chapters of the thesis investigates a core issue for designing interactive learning systems with the overarching aim of better understanding the emergence of pricing behaviour in real, spatial agricultural markets. An important problem in the competitive spatial economics literature is the lack of a rigorous theoretical explanation for observed collusive behavior in oligopsonistic markets. The first main chapter theoretically derives how the incorporation of foresight in agents' pricing policy in spatial markets might move the system towards cooperative Nash equilibria. It is shown that a basic level of foresight invites competing firms to cease limitless price wars. Introducing the concept of an outside option into the agents' decisions within a dynamic pricing game reveals viihow decreasing returns for increasing strategic thinking correlates with the relevance of transportation costs. In the second main chapter, we introduce a new learning algorithm for rational agents using H-PHC (hierarchical policy hill climbing) in spatial markets. While MASs algorithms are typically just applicable to small problems, we show experimentally how a community of multiple rational agents is able to overcome the coordination problem in a variety of spatial (and non-spatial) market games of rich decision spaces with modest computational effort. The theoretical explanation of emerging price equilibria in spatial markets is much disputed in the literature. The majority of papers attribute the pricing behavior of processing firms (mill price and freight absorption) merely to the spatial structure of markets. Based on a computational approach with interactive learning agents in two-dimensional space, the third main chapter suggests that associating the extent of freight absorption just with the factor space can be ambiguous. In addition, the pricing behavior of agricultural processors – namely the ability to coordinate and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes - also depends on their ability to learn from each other