An Analysis of issues against the adoption of Dynamic Carpooling

Using a private car is a transportation system very common in industrialized countries. However, it causes different problems such as overuse of oil, traffic jams causing earth pollution, health problems and an inefficient use of personal time. One possible solution to these problems is carpooling, i.e. sharing a trip on a private car of a driver with one or more passengers. Carpooling would reduce the number of cars on streets hence providing worldwide environmental, economical and social benefits. The matching of drivers and passengers can be facilitated by information and communication technologies. Typically, a driver inserts on a web-site the availability of empty seats on his/her car for a planned trip and potential passengers can search for trips and contact the drivers. This process is slow and can be appropriate for long trips planned days in advance. We call this static carpooling and we note it is not used frequently by people even if there are already many web-sites offering this service and in fact the only real open challenge is widespread adoption. Dynamic carpooling, on the other hand, takes advantage of the recent and increasing adoption of Internet-connected geo-aware mobile devices for enabling impromptu trip opportunities. Passengers request trips directly on the street and can find a suitable ride in just few minutes. Currently there are no dynamic carpooling systems widely used. Every attempt to create and organize such systems failed. This paper reviews the state of the art of dynamic carpooling. It identifies the most important issues against the adoption of dynamic carpooling systems and the proposed solutions for such issues. It proposes a first input on solving the problem of mass-adopting dynamic carpooling systems.Comment: 10 pages, whitepaper, extracted from B.Sc. thesis "Dycapo: On the creation of an open-source Server and a Protocol for Dynamic Carpooling" (Daniel Graziotin, 2010

Growth and institutions in Paolo Sylos Labini's thought

According to Paolo Sylos Labini (1920-2005), it is vital for an economist to be acutely conscious of the responsibility to study society for the sake of promoting progress—the economic, social and civil progress of society—and not for personal interest. In his last book, Ahi serva Italia (2006), Sylos Labini spoke as a civic-minded economist to all those Italians who refuse to understand that respect for the rules is an absolute requirement for a market economy, and, in particular, that a market economy needs rules to defend the community against the unbridled expansion of positions of power. Within this analytical framework, our paper aims to discuss the role of institutions along different lines: the role of the market in the process of economic growth, public intervention in the economy and the process of institutional innovations.Paolo Sylos Labini, growth, institutions, regulation, innovations

Controlled Matching Game for Resource Allocation and User Association in WLANs

In multi-rate IEEE 802.11 WLANs, the traditional user association based on the strongest received signal and the well known anomaly of the MAC protocol can lead to overloaded Access Points (APs), and poor or heterogeneous performance. Our goal is to propose an alternative game-theoretic approach for association. We model the joint resource allocation and user association as a matching game with complementarities and peer effects consisting of selfish players solely interested in their individual throughputs. Using recent game-theoretic results we first show that various resource sharing protocols actually fall in the scope of the set of stability-inducing resource allocation schemes. The game makes an extensive use of the Nash bargaining and some of its related properties that allow to control the incentives of the players. We show that the proposed mechanism can greatly improve the efficiency of 802.11 with heterogeneous nodes and reduce the negative impact of peer effects such as its MAC anomaly. The mechanism can be implemented as a virtual connectivity management layer to achieve efficient APs-user associations without modification of the MAC layer

The Economics of Pending Patents

We provide a treatment of a number of questions pertaining to pending patents – a subject that has so-far mainly been discussed en-passant in the existing literature. We present the underlying institutional and legal framework that governs pending patents and some basic facts related to them. Then, we focus on the strategic considerations of firms in the earliest stage of the patenting process and the interplay with the patent office. This is followed by considering the perspective of the patent and trademark offices (PTOs), in particular, acknowledging the limited resources that are available to PTOs. Finally, we investigate the potential abuse of pending patents and the role of reputation of patenting firms.patenting, pending patents, innovation, patent office overload, patent inspection, grant delays

Youth labour markets in Spain: education, training and crowding-out.

The stylised facts describing the evolution of youth labour markets in Spain can be characterised as a "high-skill, bad-job trap" where higher educated workers end up in semi or unskilled entry jobs while crowding out lower educated workers from that type of job. A simple matching model with multiple contracting regimes is used to explain how a less tigher skilled labour market can be lead to crowding-out of lower educated worker and less on-the-jobtraining.Unemployment; Education; Training matching;

Simulating interbank payment and securities settlement mechanisms with the BoF-PSS2 simulator

The simulation technique provides a new means for analysing complex interdependencies in payment and securities settlement processing. The Bank of Finland has developed a payment and settlement system simulator (BoF-PSS2) that can be used for constructing simulation models of payment and securities settlement systems. This paper describes the main elements of payment and settlement systems (system structures, interdependencies, processing steps, liquidity consumption, cost and risk dimensions) and how these can be treated in simulation studies. It gives also examples on how these elements have been incorporated in the simulator, as well as an overview of the structure and the features of the BoF-PSS2 simulator.simulations; simulator; payment systems; clearing/settlement; liquidity

Self-Evaluation Applied Mathematics 2003-2008 University of Twente

This report contains the self-study for the research assessment of the Department of Applied Mathematics (AM) of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at the University of Twente (UT). The report provides the information for the Research Assessment Committee for Applied Mathematics, dealing with mathematical sciences at the three universities of technology in the Netherlands. It describes the state of affairs pertaining to the period 1 January 2003 to 31 December 2008