Simulative and Game-Theoretical Approaches for Strategic Behavior in Name-Your-Own-Price Markets

Name-Your-Own-Price is a popular interactive pricing mechanism in Electronic Commerce that lets both, buyer and seller, influence the price of a product. At the outset, a seller defines a secret threshold price indicating the minimum price he is willing to sell the product for. Subsequently, a buyer is asked to place a bid indicating her willingness-to-pay for the product offered. If the bid value is equal or above the seller’s threshold price, the transaction is initiated for the price denoted by the buyer’s bid. In this paper we show how buyer and seller strategically behave in such markets and derive from the results what product classes seem suitable for sale in a Name-Your-Own-Price-channel. To address this question, we apply two different approaches - an agent-based simulation and a game theoretical approach - and illustrate thereby the advantages and disadvantages of both methods

Appropriating signs and meaning: The elusive economics of trademark

This paper deals with economic analysis of trademark. Its presence in markets is originally connected with the problem of information asymmetries and the need to provide information for assisting exchanges, so as to avert the market failure brought about by adverse selection. However this information-conveying function is also accompanied by a differentiation effect, arising from the power of persuasion that signs can exert on individuals. The exploitation of differentiation has given rise to the practice of branding, which ties markets and consumption to the realms of meaning and experience. Branding is so all-pervasive in today's economy as to have somehow transfigured it, so that the role of persuasion is now pre-eminent. Nonetheless, the mainstream economic theory tends to resist acknowledging this change, which would to a large extent call into question well-established hypotheses and theoretical tools. The general response has therefore been to assume that the informational role of trademark predominates, and to use this hypothesis to construct models, welfare evaluations and policy prescriptions that bear little or no relation to the actual markets. The opposing approach - in the shadow of the Nelson's and Arrow's seminal papers on economics of information - is recognising the idiosyncratic character of information, and therefore drawing conclusions and devising solutions that, while still based upon the welfare criterion, also incorporate a wider awareness and a deeper representation of the scenario under study. The present work attempts to move in this direction, showing how different disciplines can provide some key epistemological tools for enabling economists to effectively evaluate the welfare outcomes of the introduction and progressive alteration of a particular intellectual property right within the realm of signs and meanings.trademark, brand, intellectual property, economics of information, signs,economic welfare

Value Creation through Co-Opetition in Service Networks

Well-defined interfaces and standardization allow for the composition of single Web services into value-added complex services. Such complex Web Services are increasingly traded via agile marketplaces, facilitating flexible recombination of service modules to meet heterogeneous customer demands. In order to coordinate participants, this work introduces a mechanism design approach - the co-opetition mechanism - that is tailored to requirements imposed by a networked and co-opetitive environment

Local Energy Markets - Simulative Evaluation and Field Test Application of Energy Markets on Distribution Grid Level

Widespread introduction of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) such as volatile renewable generation, electric vehicles, heat-pumps and battery storages causes a paradigm shift of the power system. Traditional power systems with few large-scale power plants are expanded or replaced by millions of small- to medium-size DERs. Local Energy Markets (LEMs) are a promising approach to facilitate the optimal operation and dispatch of DERs and enhance grid-integration on regional grid levels. In this Thesis, a novel linear-optimization-based market model for LEMs is developed. The market matching problem aims to maximize the social welfare of participants while considering technical and financial aspects of participants’ assets and the distribution grid. A simulative framework is set-up to evaluate the model with regards to its capabilities to foster the optimal use of flexibilities, to provide sufficient financial incentives for participants and to improve grid-integration. Yearly simulations of LEMs and a benchmark case are carried out for three different grid types (rural, semiurban, urban) and scenario years ranging from 2020 until 2035 in 5 year steps. The simulation results reveal that self-consumption and self-sufficiency of the local energy system can be increased by 4 ... 23 and 1 ... 9 percentage points depending on the grid type when compared to a business as usual benchmark case. An analysis of possible designs for regulated electricity price components in LEMs shows that a reduction of feed-in and load peaks of 30 ... 64 % can be achieved when considering power fees in the market matching problem. The simulative evaluation also shows that the market model is able to generate temporal, spatial, and asset-specific prices signals. Depending on the grid type and its load-generation ratio, participants with generation assets have higher benefits in urban, load-dominated grids whereas consumers have higher benefits in generation-dominated rural and semiurban grids. Load forecast uncertainty is identified as one of the major challenges in LEMs. Compared to simulations with perfect foresight, benefits of market participants are substantially decreased taking into account typical electric load forecast errors on the level of individual households. The application of the market model in a six months field-test in Southern Germany demonstrates the real world applicability of the developed approach. The field-test confirms findings from the simulative evaluation regarding the implication of forecast errors and generated price signals. It additionally shows that market interfaces to the Distribution System Operator (DSO) might further increase grid-integration capabilities of LEMs. By taking into account active power constraints of the DSO, 1499 events of critical grid load could be avoided

Constitutive surveillance and social media

Starting from the premise that surveillance is the ‘dominant organising practice’ of our time (Lyon et al 2012: 1), this thesis establishes a framework of ‘constitutive surveillance’ in relation to social media, taking Facebook as its key example. Constitutive surveillance is made up of four forms: economic, political, lateral, and oppositional surveillance. These four surveillance forms – and the actors who undertake them – intersect, compound, and confront one another in the co-production of social media spaces. The framework of constitutive surveillance is structured around a Foucauldian understanding of power, and the thesis shows how each surveillance form articulates strategies of power for organising, administering, and subjectifying populations. After outlining the four surveillance forms, each chapter unpacks the relationship of one form to social media, building throughout the thesis an extensive critical framework of constitutive surveillance

Centrality in the structure of built environment: a study in the structural transformation of society and space

Born out of a long term interest in thought and social values and nearly ten years of involvement in space and design as a student of architecture and urban design, this dissertation aims to make a contribution to both the structural theory of the transformation of society and space and to our knowledge of the principle of centrality in the structure of built environment. It looks at the concept of centrality in the Iranian city of Meshed. However, this is not intended as a study of a unique experience. Rather the spatial and temporal co- ordinates of the text, Islam and Iran, and the historical period of Modernist thought, offer a framework within which theoretical and principal questions of a more general nature concerning the structural character of society and space can be explored.The emphasis throughout is on the concept of the social production of the built environment at the centre of which lies the ideal process, understood in its most general sense as purposeful human activity. The dissertation seeks to show how changes in the relations between the elements and actors of production, the physical and mental means by which the built environment is created, and the relation between moment and totality within which the production process occurs, are central to an understanding of the structural transformation of human society, the form of city and the organization of space

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

Non-technological and non-economic innovations: contributions to a theory of robust innovation

Although the label innovation is applied to almost everything, with even the diffusion of innovations to society being called innovation, innovation research remains focused on bringing technology to the economic market. this dissonance provoked the central questions discussed at the 2nd International Conference on Indicators and Concepts of Innovation (ICICI). What are non-technological and non-economic innovations? What impact do these innovations have on the economy? Are there actually purely techno- logical or economic innovations? Consisting of selected answers to these questions, this volume presents international approaches beyond the technology to market main- stream of innovation research as well as analyses of socially robust innovations that succeed in both economic and non-economic markets and are hence more sustainable and more profitable. the 2nd ICICI has been supported by the SCoPES program of the Swiss National Science Foundation