Theory of the Arbitration Process

A sensor fusion method for state estimation of a flexible industrial robot is developed. By measuring the acceleration at the end-effector, the accuracy of the arm angular position, as well as the estimated position of the end-effector are improved. The problem is formulated in a Bayesian estimation framework and two solutions are proposed; the extended Kalman filter and the particle filter. In a simulation study on a realistic flexible industrial robot, the angular position performance is shown to be close to the fundamental Cramér-Rao lower bound. The technique is also verified in experiments on an ABB robot, where the dynamic performance of the position for the end-effector is significantly improved.Vinnova Excellence Center LINK-SICSSF project Collaborative Localizatio

Social Hierarchies and the Formation of Customary Property Law in Pre-Industrial China and England

Comparative lawyers and economists have often assumed that traditional Chinese laws and customs reinforced the economic and political dominance of elites and, therefore, were unusually “despotic” towards the poor. Such assumptions are highly questionable: Quite the opposite, one of the most striking characteristics of Qing and Republican property institutions is that they often gave significantly greater economic protection to the poorer segments of society than comparable institutions in early modern England. In particular, Chinese property customs afforded much stronger powers of redemption to landowners who had pawned their land. In both societies, land-pawning occurred far more frequently among poorer households than richer ones, but Chinese customary law allowed debtors to indefinitely retain redemption rights over collateralized property, whereas English debtors would generally lose the property permanently if they failed to redeem within one year. This article argues that the comparatively “egalitarian” tendencies of Qing and Republican property institutions stemmed from the different ways Chinese and English rural communities allocated social status and rank. Hierarchical “Confucian” kinship networks dominated social and economic life in most Chinese villages. Within these networks, an individual’s status and rank depended, in large part, on his age and generational seniority, rather than personal wealth. This allowed many low-income households to enjoy status and rank quite disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, substantial landed wealth was generally a prerequisite for high status in early modern England, effectively excluding lower-income households from positions of sociopolitical authority. Chinese smallholders possessed, therefore, significantly more social bargaining power, and were more capable of negotiating desirable property institutions. Paradoxically, the predominance of kinship hierarchies actually enhanced macro-level political and economic equality

BILATERAL TRADING AND THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE: AN EXPERIMENTAL ECONOMICS STUDY

This research investigates the impact of reporting different kinds of trade information to buyers and sellers in laboratory markets, for which exchange is made through bilateral bargaining. Results suggest that public information may improve the bargaining position of buyers relative to sellers when there is spot delivery. In some cases sellers earn less than in a no information baseline. There is evidence of a curse of knowledge for sellers in our information experiments when quantity traded for the entire market is known. The mandatory price reporting of all trades does not improve the income of sellers.International Relations/Trade,

Optimal Decentralized Protocols for Electric Vehicle Charging

We propose decentralized algorithms for optimally scheduling electric vehicle charging. The algorithms exploit the elasticity and controllability of electric vehicle related loads in order to fill the valleys in electric demand profile. We formulate a global optimization problem whose objective is to impose a generalized notion of valley-filling, study properties of the optimal charging profiles, and give decentralized offline and online algorithms to solve the problem. In each iteration of the proposed algorithms, electric vehicles choose their own charging profiles for the rest horizon according to the price profile broadcast by the utility, and the utility updates the price profile to guide their behavior. The offline algorithms are guaranteed to converge to optimal charging profiles irrespective of the specifications (e.g., maximum charging rate and deadline) of electric vehicles at the expense of a restrictive assumption that all electric vehicles are available for negotiation at the beginning of the planning horizon. The online algorithms relax this assumption by using a scalar prediction of future total charging demand at each time instance and yield near optimal charging profiles. The proposed algorithms need no coordination among the electric vehicles, hence their implementation requires low communication and computation capability. Simulation results are provided to support these results

Bargaining and Influence in Conflict Situations

[Excerpt] This chapter examines bargaining as an influence process through which actors attempt to resolve a social conflict. Conflict occurs when two or more interdependent actors have incompatible preferences and perceive or anticipate resistance from each other (Blalock 1989; Kriesberg 1982). Bargaining is a basic form of goal-directed action that involves both intentions to influence and efforts by each actor to carry out these intentions. Tactics are verbal and/or nonverbal actions designed to maneuver oneself into a favorable position vis-a-vis another or to reach some accommodation. Our treatment of bargaining subsumes the concept of negotiation (see Morley and Stephenson 1977). This chapter is organized around a conceptual framework that distinguishes basic types of bargaining contexts. We begin by introducing the framework and then present an overview of and analyze theoretical and empirical work on each type of bargaining context