9,113 research outputs found

    Learning in Repeated Multi-Unit Pay-As-Bid Auctions

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    Motivated by Carbon Emissions Trading Schemes, Treasury Auctions, and Procurement Auctions, which all involve the auctioning of homogeneous multiple units, we consider the problem of learning how to bid in repeated multi-unit pay-as-bid auctions. In each of these auctions, a large number of (identical) items are to be allocated to the largest submitted bids, where the price of each of the winning bids is equal to the bid itself. The problem of learning how to bid in pay-as-bid auctions is challenging due to the combinatorial nature of the action space. We overcome this challenge by focusing on the offline setting, where the bidder optimizes their vector of bids while only having access to the past submitted bids by other bidders. We show that the optimal solution to the offline problem can be obtained using a polynomial time dynamic programming (DP) scheme. We leverage the structure of the DP scheme to design online learning algorithms with polynomial time and space complexity under full information and bandit feedback settings. We achieve an upper bound on regret of O(MTlogB)O(M\sqrt{T\log |\mathcal{B}|}) and O(MBTlogB)O(M\sqrt{|\mathcal{B}|T\log |\mathcal{B}|}) respectively, where MM is the number of units demanded by the bidder, TT is the total number of auctions, and B|\mathcal{B}| is the size of the discretized bid space. We accompany these results with a regret lower bound, which match the linear dependency in MM. Our numerical results suggest that when all agents behave according to our proposed no regret learning algorithms, the resulting market dynamics mainly converge to a welfare maximizing equilibrium where bidders submit uniform bids. Lastly, our experiments demonstrate that the pay-as-bid auction consistently generates significantly higher revenue compared to its popular alternative, the uniform price auction.Comment: 51 pages, 12 Figure

    Complicated objects: artifacts from the Yuanming Yuan in Victorian Britain

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    The 1860 spoliation of the Summer Palace at the close of the Second Opium War by British and French troops was a watershed event within the development of Britain as an imperialist nation, which guaranteed a market for opium produced in its colony India and demonstrated the power of its armed forces. The distribution of the spoils to officers and diplomatic corps by campaign leaders in Beijing was also a sign of the British Army’s rising power as an instrument of the imperialist state. These conditions would suggest that objects looted from the site would be integrated into an imperialist aesthetic that reflected and promoted the material benefits of military engagement overseas and foregrounded the circumstances of their removal to Britain for campaign members and the British public. This study mines sources dating to the two decades following the war – including British newspapers, auction house records, exhibition catalogs and works of art – to test this hypothesis. Findings show that initial movements of looted objects through the military and diplomatic corps did reinforce notions of imperialist power by enabling campaign members to profit from the spoliation through sales of looted objects and trophy displays. However, material from the Summer Palace arrived at a moment when British manufacturers and cultural leaders were engaged in a national effort to improve the quality of British goods to compete in the international marketplace and looted art was quickly interpolated in this national conversation. Ironically, the same “free trade” imperatives that motivated the invasion energized a new design movement that embraced Chinese ornament. As a consequence, political interpretations of the material outside of military collections were quickly joined by a strong response to Chinese ornament from cultural institutions and design leaders. Art from the Summer Palace held a prominent place at industrial art exhibitions of the postwar period and inspired new designs in a number of mediums. While the availability of Chinese imperial art was the consequence of a military invasion and therefore a product of imperialist expansion, evidence presented here shows that the design response to looted objects was not circumscribed by this political reality. Chinese ornament on imperial wares was ultimately celebrated for its formal qualities and acknowledged links to the Summer Palace were an indicator of good design, not a celebration of victory over a failed Chinese state. Therefore, the looting of the Summer Palace was ultimately an essential factor in the development of modern design, the essence of which is a break with Classical ornament

    On Curation: A Hermeneutical Approach

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    Starting point of this paper is the philosophical field of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics was established to account for different conditions of understanding and how they shape our interpretative processes. As different times constitute different conditions, the goal of the discipline essentially is to bridge the temporal gap between the creation of a work and its perception at a given point in time. Whereas traditionally, understanding was a matter of analyzing the historical tradition of author/artist and reader/viewer, nowadays, the perception and interpretation of art is shaped by another instance, the curator. Under the premise that selection and arrangement, i.e. curating, cannot be neutral, the author analyzes different contexts in which curating takes place and how different contexts account for different effects on our perception of art. After outlining the development of the curatorial practice—from institutional to independent curation—, a case study of Swiss curator Harald Szeemann serves as opportunity to examine specific phenomena and exhibitions in a detailed manner. A cultural and methodological cesura is proposed after which curators were able to execute the power and influence they have today: independent curation and the ahistorical exhibition. Ahistorical exhibitions disregard chronological display and enable curators to create individual narratives and themes by gathering artworks in a cross-temporal and geographical manner. Throughout the paper, it is assessed if and to what degree the application of hermeneutics onto the field of independent curation is fruitful. This theoretical analysis is followed by a market overview, in which various functions the curator fulfills in different institutions, e.g. museums, galleries, auction houses, are outlined and compared. Optimally, the consideration of cultural and commercial factors enables viewers to approach and see (curated) art in a differentiated way

    Enriching Architecture: Craft and its conservation in Anglo-Irish building production, 1660–1760

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    Refinement and enrichment of surfaces in stone, wood and plaster is a fundamental aspect of early modern architecture which has been marginalised by architectural history. Enriching Architecture aims to retrieve and rehabilitate surface achievement as a vital element of early modern buildings in Britain and Ireland. Rejected by modernism, demeaned by the conceptual ‘turn’ and too often reduced to its representative or social functions, we argue for the historical legitimacy of creative craft skill as a primary agent in architectural production. However, in contrast to the connoisseurial and developmental perspectives of the past, this book is concerned with how surfaces were designed, achieved and experienced. The contributors draw upon the major rethinking of craft and materials within the wider cultural sphere in recent years to deconstruct traditional, oppositional ways of thinking about architectural production. This is not a craft for craft’s sake argument but an effort to embed the tangible findings of conservation and curatorial research within an evidence-led architectural history that illuminates the processes of early modern craftsmanship. The book explores broad themes of surface treatment such as wainscot, rustication, plasterwork, and staircase embellishment together with chapters focused on virtuoso buildings and set pieces which illuminate these themes

    Brazilian Contemporary Art in the International Art Market

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    With changes in the art world, the Brazilian Contemporary art becomes an interesting subject to be analyzed in its relationship to the art market dynamics. The international art market has been growing since late 90s thanks to globalization. In this sense, the problematization of the research lies in an economical perspective of the art market to understand Brazilian Contemporary art internationalization through art fairs, biennials, art galleries and auction houses. With this analysis, the objective is to present an opinion about the panorama of Brazilian Contemporary art and its international market insertion

    Northern Powerhouses: the homes of the industrial elite, c.1780-1875

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    This thesis explores the world of the industrial elites of Manchester and Liverpool in the period c.1780-1875, through their houses. The homes of the industrial elites, namely merchants and manufacturers, were extremely important tangible communicators of wealth, taste, and comfort. Whilst status-building was closely connected to the house, this thesis argues that the industrial elites carved their own identities into their domestic spheres and that emulation was not solely linked with aspiration. The findings of this thesis are based around its three research aims regarding the changing location of houses in Manchester and Liverpool in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the appearance and use of houses, and the daily routines and involvement of the industrial elite in their domestic routines. An analysis of elite residential patterns in Manchester and Liverpool across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has created a more nuanced look at urban geographies of the region in this period. Though some residential patterns differed because of economic and political structure, a key finding has been that the process of suburbanisation in and around Manchester and Liverpool commenced earlier than previous scholarship has suggested. Suburbanisation among the elites began in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and into the early decades of the nineteenth century, with elite suburban communities being firmly established by the 1820s. This thesis discovered that despite socio-economic and political differences, the industrial elites of Manchester and Liverpool used their houses, gardens, and landed estates in very similar ways. This was a result of conformity which arose from emulation at both a community-based level and the emulation and aspiration of elite, gentrified lifestyle. Also, the merchants and manufacturers analysed within this work were involved in their home at every level of domesticity, from the construction of the house to the financial management of the household, although this latter theme was often a cooperative effort between spouses and family members, adding more to our understanding of gender, domesticity, and familial relations. Through detailed case studies and a combination of sources, the private lives of the industrial elites have been revaluated and redefined, including showing how their houses functions metaphorically and in reality

    Transaction pricing mechanism design and assessment for blockchain

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    The importance of transaction fees in maintaining blockchain security and sustainability has been confirmed by extensive research, although they are not mandatory in most current blockchain systems. To enhance blockchain in the long term, it is crucial to design effective transaction pricing mechanisms. Different from the existing schemes based on auctions with more consideration about the profit of miners, we resort to game theory and propose a correlated equilibrium based transaction pricing mechanism through solving a pricing game among users with transactions, which can achieve both the individual and global optimum. To avoid the computational complexity exponentially increasing with the number of transactions, we further improve the game-theoretic solution with an approximate algorithm, which can derive almost the same results as the original one but costs significantly reduced time. We also propose a truthful assessment model for pricing mechanism to collect the feedback of users regarding the price suggestion. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed mechanism
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