05011 Abstracts Collection -- Computing and Markets

From 03.01.05 to 07.01.05, the Dagstuhl Seminar 05011``Computing and Markets\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Employment, Technology and Institutions in the Process of Structural Change. A History of Economic Thought Perspective

The present issue of the Working Papers series of the Dipartimento di Economia Politica at Milano- Bicocca reproduces the contributions presented at the mid-year ESHET Conference which took place at the Universities of Pavia and Milano-Bicocca on 16 and 17 November 2001. The program was arranged jointly by Gianni Vaggi and Pier Luigi Porta and the Conference was jointly organised by ESHET with the Department of Political Economy and Quantitative Methods of the University of Pavia and the Department of Political Economy of the University of Milano-Bicocca. The idea around which the Conference was built referred basically to Luigi Pasinetti’s conception of structural change and structural dynamics in a history-of-thought perspective. Luigi Pasinetti, Eshet’s first President, opened the Conference at the University of Pavia. The program included two sessions taking half a day each: the opening session was in Pavia on 16 November 2001 and the final session in Milan the 17 November. Luigi Pasinetti chaired the session held at the University of Pavia and Andrew Skinner was the chairman in Milan.

Online Auctions with Re-usable Goods

This paper concerns the design of mechanisms for online scheduling in which agents bid for access to a re-usable resource such as processor time or wireless network access. Each agent is assumed to arrive and depart dynamically, and in the basic model require the resource for one unit of time. We seek mechanisms that are truthful in the sense that truthful revelation of arrival, departure and value information is a dominant strategy, and that are online in the sense that they make allocation decisions without knowledge of the future. First, we provide two characterizations for the class of truthful online allocation rules. The characterizations extend beyond the typical single-parameter settings, and formalize the role of restricted misreporting in reversing existing price-based characterizations. Second, we present an online auction for unit-length jobs that achieves total value that is 2-competitive with the maximum offline value. We prove that no truthful deterministic online mechanism can achieve a better competitive ratio. Third, we consider revenue competitiveness and prove that no deterministic truthful online auction has revenue that is constant-competitive with that of the offline Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism We provide a randomized online auction that achieves a competitive ratio of O(log h), where h is the ratio of maximum value to minimum value among the agents; this mechanism does not require prior knowledge of h. Finally, we generalize our model to settings with multiple re-usable goods and to agents with different job lengths.Engineering and Applied Science

Cooperative Internet access using heterogeneous wireless networks

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Coordination in Service Value Networks - A Mechanism Design Approach

The fundamental paradigm shift from traditional value chains to agile service value networks (SVN) implies new economic and organizational challenges. This work provides an auction-based coordination mechanism that enables the allocation and pricing of service compositions in SVNs. The mechanism is multidimensional incentive compatible and implements an ex-post service level enforcement. Further extensions of the mechanism are evaluated following analytical and numerical research methods

Discriminant analysis as a decision-making tool for geochemically fingerprinting sources of groundwater salinity and other work

The thesis presented herein is a compilation of two different research projects I have been fortunate enough to work on during my graduate career at Syracuse University. The first and most complete project is a data analysis study using linear discriminant analysis to differentiate between sources of groundwater salinity in water samples from shallow groundwater wells. It is a model validation study that builds on previous work spearheaded by the Earth Sciences Department at Syracuse University. It represents some of my best work performed at Syracuse and should be considered the bulk of my thesis submission. Due to successful publication of that research early into my graduate career I had the opportunity to work on another project. The Technical Supplement is a review of the work I have done in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy. The main project goal was to study the hydrologic effects that beaver dam analogues may have on an incised stream system and to understand the utility of drone-derived imagery for hydrologic modeling. During my time working on this project, a lot was learned about best practices and avenues of future research. To make sure that this knowledge is not lost, it is recorded here