ReQwip : business plan and go-to-market strategy

textThe nature of this Report is to outline the proposed business opportunity for reQwip -- an online marketplace for buying, selling and renting sports equipment -- and the go-to-market strategy for this young startup. reQwip is an Austin, Texas-based technology company founded by students and alumni of The University of Texas at Austin for the purpuse of creating a mobile, peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace for buying, selling and renting new and used sports equipment. ReQwip is launching its minimum viable product (MVP) in Spring 2014. The MVP is a liquid marketplace focused specifically on buying and selling new and used cycling and triathlon gear in Austin,TX and greater Central Texas. This MVP is our gateway into a sporting goods industry worth $150 billion in sales worldwide and$54 billion in the United States, of which $1-3 billion is used gear sales in the U.S.AdvertisingBusiness Administratio

Distributional Preferences, Reciprocity-Like Behavior, and Efficiency in Bilateral Exchange

Under what conditions do distributional preferences, such as altruism or a concern for fair outcomes, generate efficient trade? I analyze theoretically a simple bilateral exchange game: each player sequentially takes an action that reduces his own material payoff but increases the other player’s. Each player’s preferences may depend on both his/her own material payoff and the other player’s. I identify two key properties of the second-mover’s preferences: indifference curves kinked around “fair” material-payoff distributions, and materials payoffs entering preferences as “normal goods.” Either property can drive reciprocity-like behavior and generate a Pareto efficient outcome

An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Thompson Sampling

We provide an information-theoretic analysis of Thompson sampling that applies across a broad range of online optimization problems in which a decision-maker must learn from partial feedback. This analysis inherits the simplicity and elegance of information theory and leads to regret bounds that scale with the entropy of the optimal-action distribution. This strengthens preexisting results and yields new insight into how information improves performance

Phases of New Physics in the CMB

Fluctuations in the cosmic neutrino background are known to produce a phase shift in the acoustic peaks of the cosmic microwave background. It is through the sensitivity to this effect that the recent CMB data has provided a robust detection of free-streaming neutrinos. In this paper, we revisit the phase shift of the CMB anisotropy spectrum as a probe of new physics. The phase shift is particularly interesting because its physical origin is strongly constrained by the analytic properties of the Green's function of the gravitational potential. For adiabatic fluctuations, a phase shift requires modes that propagate faster than the speed of fluctuations in the photon-baryon plasma. This possibility is realized by free-streaming relativistic particles, such as neutrinos or other forms of dark radiation. Alternatively, a phase shift can arise from isocurvature fluctuations. We present simple models to illustrate each of these effects. We then provide observational constraints from the Planck temperature and polarization data on additional forms of radiation. We also forecast the capabilities of future CMB Stage IV experiments. Whenever possible, we give analytic interpretations of our results.Comment: 39 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables; v2: minor corrections, references added; v3: corrected Planck parameter constraints, conclusions unchange