Los Angeles Labor Negotiations Study

[Excerpt] Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting and Cornell University have completed a study of the City of Los Angeles’ labor negotiation policies, processes and practices, under contract with the City Controller’s Office. The objectives of the study are to: • Review negotiations executed within the last three years for lessons learned, as well as review negotiations currently underway. • Evaluate and map the City’s current collective bargaining process. • Conduct a nationwide search for promising practices the City could incorporate into the collective bargaining process. • Evaluate the fiscal impacts of labor negotiations. • Evaluate the role of and incentives for each party in the process. • Evaluate the labor-management relationships outside of the bargaining process. • Identify opportunities for improving labor-management relations. Cornell University addressed the City’s current labor relations process and identified areas for improvement or consideration (Sections I and III), while Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting focused on the financial implications of the City’s collective bargaining practices (Section II). Cornell ILR faculty who contributed their time to this study include: Associate Dean Suzanne Bruyere, Marcia Calicchia (Project Lead), Lou Jean Fleron, Professor Emeritus and former Associate Dean Lois S. Gray, Dean Harry Katz, Sally Klingel, Peter Lazes, Tom Quimby, Jane Savage, Rocco Scanza, Scott Sears, and Associate Dean and Vice Provost for Land Grant Affairs Ronald Seeber. Pam Strausser in Cornell’s Office of Human Resources and Mildred Warner in Cornell’s Department of City and Regional Planning also provided invaluable assistance

A Rule-driven Approach for Defining the Behavior of Negotiating Software Agents

One problem with existing agent-mediated negotiation systems is that they rely on ad hoc, static, non-adaptive, and hardcoded schemes to represent the behaviour of agents. This limitation is probably due to the complexity of the negotiation task itself. Indeed, while negotiating, software (human) agents face tough decisions. These decisions are based not only on the information made available by the negotiation server, but on the behaviour of the other participants in the negotiation process as well. The information and the behaviour in question are constantly changing and highly uncertain. In the first part of the paper, we propose a rule-driven approach to represent, manage and explore negotiation strategies and coordination information. For that, we divide the behaviour of negotiating agents into protocols, strategies and coordination. Among the many advantages of the proposed solution, we can cite the high level of abstraction, the closeness to human understanding, the versatility, and the possibility to modify the agents' behaviour during the negotiation process. To validate our solution, we ran many agent tournaments, and used the rule-driven approach to implement bidding strategies that are common in the English and Dutch auctions. We also implemented simple coordination schemes across several auctions. The ongoing validation work is detailed and discussed in the second part of the paper. Un des inconvénients qu'on retrouve fréquemment dans les systèmes de négociation par agents est qu'ils reposent sur des schémas ad-hoc, non adaptatifs et figés dans le code pour représenter le comportement des agents. Cette limitation est probablement due à la complexité de l'activité de négociation elle-même. En effet, au cours de la négociation, les agents logiciels (humains) ont des décisions difficiles à prendre. Ces décisions ne sont pas seulement basées sur l'information disponible sur le serveur de négociation, mais aussi sur le comportement des autres participants durant le processus de négociation. L'information et le comportement en question changent constamment et sont très incertains. Dans la première partie de l'article, nous proposons une approche à base de règles pour représenter, gérer et explorer les stratégies de négociation ainsi que l'information de coordination. Parmi les nombreux avantages de la solution proposée, on peut citer le haut niveau d'abstraction, la proximité avec la compréhension humaine, la souplesse d'utilisation et la possibilité de modifier le comportement des agents durant le processus de négociation. Pour valider notre solution, nous avons effectué plusieurs tournois entre agents et utilisé l'approche à base de règles pour implémenter des stratégies simples applicables à l'enchère anglaise et à l'enchère hollandaise. Nous avons aussi implémenté des schémas simples de coordination impliquant plusieurs enchères. Le travail de validation, en cours, est détaillé et discuté dans la seconde partie de l'article.e-negotiation, online auction, software agent, negotiation strategy, coordination, rule-based system, rule engine, Négociation électronique, enchères en ligne, agents logiciels, stratégie de négociation, coordination, système à base de règles, moteur de règles

An SLA-driven framework for dynamic multimedia content delivery federations

Recently, the Internet has become a popular platform for the delivery of multimedia content. However, its best effort delivery approach is ill-suited to guarantee the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of many existing multimedia services, which results in a significant reduction of the Quality of Experience. This paper presents a solution to these problems, in the form of a framework for dynamically setting up federations between the stakeholders involved in the content delivery chain. More specifically, the framework provides an automated mechanism to set up end-to-end delivery paths from the content provider to the access Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which act as its direct customers and represent a group of end-users. Driven by Service Level Agreements (SLAs), QoS contracts are automatically negotiated between the content provider, the access ISPs, and the intermediary network domains along the delivery paths. These contracts capture the delivered QoS and resource reservation costs, which are subsequently used in the price negotiations between content provider and access ISPs. Additionally, it supports the inclusion of cloud providers within the federations, supporting on-the-fly allocation of computational and storage resources. This allows the automatic deployment and configuration of proxy caches along the delivery paths, which potentially reduce delivery costs and increase delivered quality

Automated Negotiation for Provisioning Virtual Private Networks Using FIPA-Compliant Agents

This paper describes the design and implementation of negotiating agents for the task of provisioning virtual private networks. The agents and their interactions comply with the FIPA specification and they are implemented using the FIPA-OS agent framework. Particular attention is focused on the design and implementation of the negotiation algorithms

A personal networking solution

This paper presents an overview of research being conducted on Personal Networking Solutions within the Mobile VCE Personal Distributed Environment Work Area. In particular it attempts to highlight areas of commonality with the MAGNET initiative. These areas include trust of foreign devices and service providers, dynamic real-time service negotiation to permit context-aware service delivery, an automated controller algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks, and routing protocols for ad hoc networking environments. Where possible references are provided to Mobile VCE publications to enable further reading

UK digital library licences and authentication systems : national versus local approaches

To examine the system of electronic library service licences and authentication in the UK, and highlight its hybrid local - national approach

Basel II: A Contracting Perspective

Financial safety nets are incomplete social contracts that assign responsibility to various economic sectors for preventing, detecting, and paying for potentially crippling losses at financial institutions. This paper uses the theories of incomplete contracts and sequential bargaining to interpret the Basel Accords as a framework for endlessly renegotiating minimal duties and standards of safety-net management across the community of nations. Modelling the stakes and stakeholders represented by different regulators helps us to understand that inconsistencies exist in prior understandings about the range of sectoral effects that the 2004 Basel II agreement might produce. The analysis seeks to explain why, in the U.S., attempting to resolve these inconsistencies has spawned an embarrassingly fractious debate and repeatedly pushed back Basel II's scheduled implementation.

The Growing Complexity of Internet Interconnection

End-to-End (E2E) packet delivery in the Internet is achieved through a system of interconnections between heterogeneous entities called Autonomous Systems (ASes). The initial pattern of AS interconnection in the Internet was relatively simple, involving mainly ISPs with a balanced mixture of inbound and outbound traffic. Changing market conditions and industrial organization of the Internet have jointly forced interconnections and associated contracts to become significantly more diverse and complex. The diversity of interconnection contracts is significant because efficient allocation of costs and revenues across the Internet value chain impacts the profitability of the industry. Not surprisingly, the challenges of recovering the fixed and usage-sensitive costs of network transport give rise to more complex settlements mechanisms than the simple bifurcated (transit and peering) model described in many earlier analyses of Internet interconnection (see BESEN et al., 2001; GREENSTEIN, 2005; or LAFFONT et al., 2003). In the following, we provide insight into recent operational developments, explaining why interconnection in the Internet has become more complex, the nature of interconnection bargaining processes, the implications for cost/revenue allocation and hence interconnection incentives, and what this means for public policy. This paper offers an abbreviated version of the original paper (see FARATIN et al., 2007b).internet interconnection, economics, public policy, routing, peering.

Implementing Privacy Negotiations in E-Commerce

This paper examines how service providers may resolve the trade-off between their personalization efforts and users' individual privacy concerns. Finding that neither an optimized one-size-fits-all strategy, nor a market-driven specialization of providers or choices between different usage scenarios can solve the problem, we analyze how negotiation techniques can lead to efficient contracts and how they can be integrated into current technologies. The analysis includes the identification of relevant and negotiable privacy dimensions for different usage domains. Negotiations in multi-channel retailing are examined as a detailed example. Based on a formalization of the user's privacy revelation problem, we model the negotiation process as a Bayesian game where the service provider faces different types of users. Finally an extension to P3P is proposed that allows a simple expression and implementation of negotiation processes. Support for this extension has been integrated in the Mozilla browser.