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Determining Utility System Value of Demand Flexibility From Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings
This report focuses on ways current methods and practices that establish the value to electric utility systems of distributed energy resource (DER) investments can be enhanced to determine the value of demand flexibility in grid-interactive efficient buildings that can provide grid services. The report introduces key valuation concepts that are applicable to demand flexibility that these buildings can provide and links to other documents that describe these concepts and their implementation in more detail.The scope of this report is limited to the valuation of economic benefits to the utility system. These are the foundational values on which other benefits (and costs) can be built. Establishing the economic value to the grid of demand flexibility provides the information needed to design programs, market rules, and rates that align the economic interest of utility customers with building owners and occupants. By nature, DERs directly impact customers and provide societal benefits external to the utility system. Jurisdictions can use utility system benefits and costs as the foundation of their economic analysis but align their primary cost-effectiveness metric with all applicable policy objectives, which may include customer and societal (non-utility system) impacts.This report suggests enhancements to current methods and practices that state and local policymakers, public utility commissions, state energy offices, utilities, state utility consumer representatives, and other stakeholders might support. These enhancements can improve the consistency and robustness of economic valuation of demand flexibility for grid services. The report concludes with a discussion of considerations for prioritizing implementation of these improvements
Rational Proofs with Multiple Provers
Interactive proofs (IP) model a world where a verifier delegates computation
to an untrustworthy prover, verifying the prover's claims before accepting
them. IP protocols have applications in areas such as verifiable computation
outsourcing, computation delegation, cloud computing. In these applications,
the verifier may pay the prover based on the quality of his work. Rational
interactive proofs (RIP), introduced by Azar and Micali (2012), are an
interactive-proof system with payments, in which the prover is rational rather
than untrustworthy---he may lie, but only to increase his payment. Rational
proofs leverage the provers' rationality to obtain simple and efficient
protocols. Azar and Micali show that RIP=IP(=PSAPCE). They leave the question
of whether multiple provers are more powerful than a single prover for rational
and classical proofs as an open problem.
In this paper, we introduce multi-prover rational interactive proofs (MRIP).
Here, a verifier cross-checks the provers' answers with each other and pays
them according to the messages exchanged. The provers are cooperative and
maximize their total expected payment if and only if the verifier learns the
correct answer to the problem. We further refine the model of MRIP to
incorporate utility gap, which is the loss in payment suffered by provers who
mislead the verifier to the wrong answer.
We define the class of MRIP protocols with constant, noticeable and
negligible utility gaps. We give tight characterization for all three MRIP
classes. We show that under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions, MRIP is
more powerful than both RIP and MIP ; and this is true even the utility gap is
required to be constant. Furthermore the full power of each MRIP class can be
achieved using only two provers and three rounds. (A preliminary version of
this paper appeared at ITCS 2016. This is the full version that contains new
results.)Comment: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Innovations in Theoretical
Computer Science. ACM, 201
A Utility-Theoretic Approach to Privacy in Online Services
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by introducing methods to personalize services based on special knowledge about users and their context. For example, a user's demographics, location, and past search and browsing may be useful in enhancing the results offered in response to web search queries. However, reasonable concerns about privacy by both users, providers, and government agencies acting on behalf of citizens, may limit access by services to such information. We introduce and explore an economics of privacy in personalization, where people can opt to share personal information, in a standing or on-demand manner, in return for expected enhancements in the quality of an online service. We focus on the example of web search and formulate realistic objective functions for search efficacy and privacy. We demonstrate how we can find a provably near-optimal optimization of the utility-privacy tradeoff in an efficient manner. We evaluate our methodology on data drawn from a log of the search activity of volunteer participants. We separately assess usersā preferences about privacy and utility via a large-scale survey, aimed at eliciting preferences about peoplesā willingness to trade the sharing of personal data in returns for gains in search efficiency. We show that a significant level of personalization can be achieved using a relatively small amount of information about users
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