Carrot or stick? A study on “bid-rigging norms” by simulation: inducing factors and deterring measures

This study aims to analyze the structure of the emergence and maintenance of the cartel mechanism as an informal organization and the measures to deter bid-rigging. We propose an agent-based bid-rigging norms model and validate it with a mathematical model. We clarify that the auction system primarily used in public procurements has a structure inducing bid-rigging in which meta-norms are unnecessary. We also show that punishment for deviation from bid-rigging plays a critical role in establishing and maintaining it. In addition, we explore the authorities' actions to deter bid-rigging by examining three measures: the flexible setting of reserve prices, the administrative surcharge and leniency system under the Antimonopoly Law, and applying the bid-rigging offense under the Criminal Law. As a result, the study reveals that the administrative surcharge and the leniency system are insufficient to deter bid-rigging, and the adequate measures are the flexible setting of reserve prices and applying the bid-rigging offense. Furthermore, the simultaneous implementation of these three measures more effectively enables deterring bid-rigging

Reverse Auction Bidding – Impact of Personality Type on Bidding Strategy and Profit

This research into Reverse Auction Bidding (RAB) is the first of the twenty four studies completed to this time to use an individual with personality type Idealist specifically against other personality types. Amongst all studies, result of one of the previous studies showed that personality type Idealist won over personality type Guardian and it was the first where this unexpected result was observed. This study attempts to verify the previous finding that an Idealist performs better than a Guardian, as Guardians are the usual winners. RAB is a new form of bidding using internet as the bidding tool. In RAB the buyer and a set of sellers adopt a slightly different role than in Forward Auction. This study used four students from the Department of Construction Science at Texas A&M University as the subjects of the work. Specific details of the game are that each bidder has capacity to bid on three jobs at any time. All bidders initially have a bank amount of $40,000 and can buy additional capacity from the bank to increase the number of allowed simultaneous bids. Each game lasts for twenty minutes, fifteen minutes of game play followed by a five minute break. In each study, each individual participant was given a personality test, Keirsey Temperament Sorter Test. All the participants were identified to be Guardians in this study. There was no individual with personality type Idealist. This is possible because of low proportion of Idealists’ in general. The original hypothesis looked to determine the impact of Idealists, but as will all research one must deal with the hand dealt. The study of four Guardians is in itself of interest and tolerably rare event, so the study looked at four Guardians. The implicit hypothesis in this study is that Guardians should all be economically efficient bidders. It has been observed that when Guardians play against other personality type they outperform but when Guardians play against each other the profit drops significantly. This is an interesting problem, why do Guardians perform poorly against other Guardians should be the subject of further research. The next stage is to look to the sub-groups within the Guardian personality type. The bidders with characteristic property ISTJ according to the Test, or also called Inspector, were more competitive than other Guardians. Further work is recommended to understand the behavior difference and bid pattern for sub categories of Guardians

Carbon Pricing in Canada: A Performance Review

The purpose of this major research paper is to examine the effectiveness of carbon pricing systems, in terms of their political longevity and their environmental robustness. It aims at comparing carbon taxes with cap-and-trade regimes in the Canadian context, to investigate which one of these two approaches can withstand electoral political change, and to assess whether such systems can result in GHG emission reductions. The research also examines the possibility of the simultaneous implementation of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade mechanisms. Furthermore, it explores whether carbon pricing systems could be implemented with other climate change mitigation policies. In addition, it identifies limitations and trade-offs that the implementation of carbon pricing faces. Finally, it provides policy recommendations for advancing such systems in Canada in particular. The paper contributes, as well, to the understanding of whether carbon taxes really make sense by highlighting the economics of emissions reduction and turning the spotlight on the welfare analysis of negative externalities

The Taxation of Nonshareholder Contributions to Capital: An Economic Analysis

Every year, billions of dollars are contributed to corporations by persons who are neither owners nor shareholders of those corporations. These contributions, categorized under the income tax laws as non- shareholder contributions to capital, play an important economic role in subsidizing the construction of new factories and other improvements to the nation\u27s infrastructure. This Article concerns the federal income tax treatment of the two principal categories of nonshareholder contributions to capital, which together encompass the great majority of these transactions. The first category consists of contributions made for the purpose of obtaining economic development. Typically, this occurs when governments and business groups contribute property to corporations in order to persuade those corporations to construct factories and other facilities in their local areas. These contributions are made to the firms so that the local area will benefit from the jobs and economic stimulation provided, as positive externalities,\u27 by the operation of the factories in the vicinity. Under present law, corporations are not taxed on contributions they receive for economic development. When, for example, a corporation receives free land from a state government as an inducement to construct a factory, the law generally allows the corporation to exclude the value of the land from its taxable income.\u27 Present law thus implicitly assumes that the corporation does not have income, defined as an accretion to wealth, from the receipt of the land

DRIVE: A Distributed Economic Meta-Scheduler for the Federation of Grid and Cloud Systems

The computational landscape is littered with islands of disjoint resource providers including commercial Clouds, private Clouds, national Grids, institutional Grids, clusters, and data centers. These providers are independent and isolated due to a lack of communication and coordination, they are also often proprietary without standardised interfaces, protocols, or execution environments. The lack of standardisation and global transparency has the effect of binding consumers to individual providers. With the increasing ubiquity of computation providers there is an opportunity to create federated architectures that span both Grid and Cloud computing providers effectively creating a global computing infrastructure. In order to realise this vision, secure and scalable mechanisms to coordinate resource access are required. This thesis proposes a generic meta-scheduling architecture to facilitate federated resource allocation in which users can provision resources from a range of heterogeneous (service) providers. Efficient resource allocation is difficult in large scale distributed environments due to the inherent lack of centralised control. In a Grid model, local resource managers govern access to a pool of resources within a single administrative domain but have only a local view of the Grid and are unable to collaborate when allocating jobs. Meta-schedulers act at a higher level able to submit jobs to multiple resource managers, however they are most often deployed on a per-client basis and are therefore concerned with only their allocations, essentially competing against one another. In a federated environment the widespread adoption of utility computing models seen in commercial Cloud providers has re-motivated the need for economically aware meta-schedulers. Economies provide a way to represent the different goals and strategies that exist in a competitive distributed environment. The use of economic allocation principles effectively creates an open service market that provides efficient allocation and incentives for participation. The major contributions of this thesis are the architecture and prototype implementation of the DRIVE meta-scheduler. DRIVE is a Virtual Organisation (VO) based distributed economic metascheduler in which members of the VO collaboratively allocate services or resources. Providers joining the VO contribute obligation services to the VO. These contributed services are in effect membership “dues” and are used in the running of the VOs operations – for example allocation, advertising, and general management. DRIVE is independent from a particular class of provider (Service, Grid, or Cloud) or specific economic protocol. This independence enables allocation in federated environments composed of heterogeneous providers in vastly different scenarios. Protocol independence facilitates the use of arbitrary protocols based on specific requirements and infrastructural availability. For instance, within a single organisation where internal trust exists, users can achieve maximum allocation performance by choosing a simple economic protocol. In a global utility Grid no such trust exists. The same meta-scheduler architecture can be used with a secure protocol which ensures the allocation is carried out fairly in the absence of trust. DRIVE establishes contracts between participants as the result of allocation. A contract describes individual requirements and obligations of each party. A unique two stage contract negotiation protocol is used to minimise the effect of allocation latency. In addition due to the co-op nature of the architecture and the use of secure privacy preserving protocols, DRIVE can be deployed in a distributed environment without requiring large scale dedicated resources. This thesis presents several other contributions related to meta-scheduling and open service markets. To overcome the perceived performance limitations of economic systems four high utilisation strategies have been developed and evaluated. Each strategy is shown to improve occupancy, utilisation and profit using synthetic workloads based on a production Grid trace. The gRAVI service wrapping toolkit is presented to address the difficulty web enabling existing applications. The gRAVI toolkit has been extended for this thesis such that it creates economically aware (DRIVE-enabled) services that can be transparently traded in a DRIVE market without requiring developer input. The final contribution of this thesis is the definition and architecture of a Social Cloud – a dynamic Cloud computing infrastructure composed of virtualised resources contributed by members of a Social network. The Social Cloud prototype is based on DRIVE and highlights the ease in which dynamic DRIVE markets can be created and used in different domains

Strategy-proof resource pricing in federated systems

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Municipal Handbook (2007)

A comprehensive manual on municipal government in Tennessee