Incentive Design and Market Evolution of Mobile User-Provided Networks

An operator-assisted user-provided network (UPN) has the potential to achieve a low cost ubiquitous Internet connectivity, without significantly increasing the network infrastructure investment. In this paper, we consider such a network where the network operator encourages some of her subscribers to operate as mobile Wi-Fi hotspots (hosts), providing Internet connectivity for other subscribers (clients). We formulate the interaction between the operator and mobile users as a two-stage game. In Stage I, the operator determines the usage-based pricing and quota-based incentive mechanism for the data usage. In Stage II, the mobile users make their decisions about whether to be a host, or a client, or not a subscriber at all. We characterize how the users' membership choices will affect each other's payoffs in Stage II, and how the operator optimizes her decision in Stage I to maximize her profit. Our theoretical and numerical results show that the operator's maximum profit increases with the user density under the proposed hybrid pricing mechanism, and the profit gain can be up to 50\% in a dense network comparing with a pricing-only approach with no incentives.Comment: This manuscript serves as the online technical report of the article published in IEEE Workshop on Smart Data Pricing (SDP), 201

The procurement of professional planning services for roading projects under a competitive pricing regime : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Resource and Environmental Planning at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

The introduction of the Transit New Zealand Act changed the provisions for purchasing professional services for the development of roading projects. This change was consistent with the wider shift of the public sector towards greater transparency and accountability, and the separation of the roles of the funder, purchaser and provider of government services. The Act states that all professional services contracts for the development of roading projects are to be contracted out to the private sector by tender, with the selection of consultant determined by a Competitive Pricing Procedure (CPP). This study has been undertaken as a preliminary assessment of the factors that influence the implementation of competitive tendering for professional services and its impact on planning practice in New Zealand. The study is based on a literature review and original research. Surveys were undertaken with representatives from both the consultants and tendering authorities with experience in CPP, to obtain their views on different aspects of the tendering procedures adopted by Transfund New Zealand. Follow up interviews were also carried out with key representatives involved in the market to identify their responses to the survey results. It is concluded that there are significant differences in perception of the effectiveness of the implementation of the CPP between suppliers and purchasers, particularly with the planning services associated with roading projects. Consultants consider that they must put in the most competitive price in order to win a contract. This, they believe, compromises the quality of planning services by limiting the number of interested and affected parties that can be consulted, by favouring the simplest method of evaluation of environmental effects, and by discouraging the use of the best people for the job

Use of discrete choice to obtain urban freight evaluation data

The ex-ante evaluation of urban freight solutions is a complex task, due to the interference of different stakeholder groups with different views and objectives. The multi-actor multi-criteria methods have developed as a response to this scenario, but the determination of the weights required by them remains an unclear and controversial task. We propose the use of discrete choice methods as a powerful tool to confront these multi-faced evaluation problems, since the resulting surveys are flexible and easy to respond, and do not give away the final quantitative results. We have applied this methodology to the selection of urban freight solutions in the city of Seville, in Spain, followed by the determination of the relative weights associated to different objectives, both analyses carried out from the side of the carriers stakeholder group.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2013-47286-C3-3-

Competitive Charging Station Pricing for Plug-in Electric Vehicles

This paper considers the problem of charging station pricing and plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) station selection. When a PEV needs to be charged, it selects a charging station by considering the charging prices, waiting times, and travel distances. Each charging station optimizes its charging price based on the prediction of the PEVs' charging station selection decisions and the other station's pricing decision, in order to maximize its profit. To obtain insights of such a highly coupled system, we consider a one-dimensional system with two competing charging stations and Poisson arriving PEVs. We propose a multi-leader-multi-follower Stackelberg game model, in which the charging stations (leaders) announce their charging prices in Stage I, and the PEVs (followers) make their charging station selections in Stage II. We show that there always exists a unique charging station selection equilibrium in Stage II, and such equilibrium depends on the charging stations' service capacities and the price difference between them. We then characterize the sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the pricing equilibrium in Stage I. We also develop a low complexity algorithm that efficiently computes the pricing equilibrium and the subgame perfect equilibrium of the two-stage Stackelberg game.Comment: 15 pages, 21 figure

Sale Price, Marketing Time, and Limited Service Listings: The Influence of Home Value and Market Conditions

Local markets for real estate brokerage services typically exhibit fairly strict pricing. Increased popularity of limited service brokerages provides an opportunity to study any loss in utility by sellers using these firms. Anecdotal evidence suggests that sellers experience a decreased selling price or an increased marketing time when utilizing limited service brokers, but there has been little prior empirical work. This study finds that limited service listings sell for significantly more and spend significantly less time on the market than traditional listings. The price and marketing time impacts vary by home value and local market conditions.

Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic