Smart home on the rise? The role of trust and privacy in technology acceptance of smart home devices

In recent years, smart devices have been more prevalent in people’s homes. In this context, this study analyzes the role of trust and privacy in technology acceptance of those devices. Derived from theoretical considerations, we form eleven hypotheses and test them by structural equation modeling (SEM). The analysis relies on data from a quantitative survey on smart thermostats with 324 participants from Germany. The results indicate a strong positive total effect of trust and a negative impact of privacy concerns on the intention to use, showing the special relationships of those factors in the context of smart home technology

Distributed Ledger Technology in the Financial Industry: Managerial, Organizational, and Technological Challenges

Although the potential of distributed ledger technology (DLT) is generally acknowledged, there is still little evidence of effective widespread use in the financial industry. Coming from this observation, this study aims at analyzing the key challenges of DLT in banking and insurance not only from a technical but also from a managerial and organizational perspective addressing people- and process-related issues. For this purpose, twelve German and Swiss industry experts are interviewed. The resulting eight hours of interviews or around 120 transcribed pages are deductively and inductively categorized as well as qualitatively analyzed. The findings of the interview indicate that there are significant managerial and, in particular, organizational challenges that outweigh the technical barriers and impede the progress of DLT in the financial industry. In conclusion, the insights of this study show the importance of non-technical issues concerning DLT and guide future research in this direction

Automated Negotiations Under Uncertain Preferences

Automated Negotiation is an emerging field of electronic markets and multi-agent system research. Market engineers are faced in this connection with computational as well as economic issues, such as individual rationality and incentive compatibility. Most literature is focused on autonomous agents and negotiation protocols regarding these issues. However, common protocols show two deficiencies: (1) neglected consideration of agents’ incentives to strive for social welfare, (2) underemphasised acknowledgement that agents build their decision upon preference information delivered by human principals. Since human beings make use of heuristics for preference elicitation, their preferences are subject to informational uncertainty. The contribution of this paper is the proposition of a research agenda that aims at overcoming these research deficiencies. Our research agenda draws theoretically and methodologically on auctions, iterative bargaining, and fuzzy set theory. We complement our agenda with simulation-based preliminary results regarding differences in the application of auctions and iterative bargaining

Serious Gaming for the Evaluation of Market Mechanisms

Design science consists of two major design processes: building and evaluation. A wellexecuted evaluation of design artifacts is crucial to their success. Traditional evaluation tools have certain weaknesses because design artifacts include “wicked” problems. Serious Gaming can help to overcome these problems. To this end an online based cloud resource managing game is developed which simulates the implementation of a market mechanism and represents a new design artifact. This mechanism is a heuristic solution consisting of dynamic pricing and a priority policy. The aim of this research is to show that Serious Gaming complements traditional evaluation tools and improves the evaluation of market mechanisms. Therefore, a general guideline for designing Serious Games for evaluation is developed and a classification of Serious Gaming is established. After having collected sufficient data, future work will be to analyze players’ behavior and finally evaluate the market mechanism

Evolving Neural Networks to Solve a Two-Stage Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with Family Setup Times

We present a novel strategy to solve a two-stage hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with family setup times. The problem is derived from an industrial case. Our strategy involves the application of NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies - a genetic algorithm, which generates arbitrary neural networks being able to estimate job sequences. The algorithm is coupled with a discrete-event simulation model, which evaluates different network configurations and provides training signals. We compare the performance and computational efficiency of the proposed concept with other solution approaches. Our investigations indicate that NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies can possibly compete with state-of-the-art approaches in terms of solution quality and outperform them in terms of computational efficiency

Влияние токовой нейтрализации и геометрии обратного токопровода на трансформацию низкоэнергетического сильноточного пучка в плазменном канале

Теоретически исследовано влияние параметров системы и пучка на трансформацию поперечного сечения пучка в аксиальнонеоднородном магнитном поле обратного токопровода. Показано, что трансформация сечения слаборелятивистского электронного пучка, компенсированного по заряду, зависит от геометрии токопровода, уровня токовой нейтрализации и начального распределения плотности электронов

Kombinatorische Auktionen als Instrument zur Verhandlung von Verträgen mit interdependenten Eigenschaften

Der technologische Fortschritt beim E-Commerce, bei der betrieblichen Planung und im Zusammenhang mit intelligenten Multi-Agenten-Systemen eröffnet eine Vielzahl an Möglichkeiten für automatisierte Verhandlungen durch Softwareagenten. Die Interdependenz verschiedener Verhandlungsgegenstände in der Form von Vertragseigenschaften kann dabei zu nicht-linearen Vertragsräumen führen, sodass Verträge mit hoher sozialer Wohlfahrt nicht erreicht werden. Als Lösungsansatz wurde ein kombinatorisches Auktionsverhandlungsprotokoll entwickelt, das Bestimmungsrechte zu Vertragseigenschaften versteigert. Das Verhandlungsprotokoll wurde simulativ getestet und mit weiteren Protokollen in Bezug auf Wohlfahrtsgüte, Rechenleistung und Anreizkompatibilität verglichen. Als Ergebnis erreichte das vorgeschlagene Auktionsverhandlungsprotokoll Verträge mit der höchsten Wohlfahrt innerhalb für die adressierten Anwendungen praxistauglicher Rechenzeit verbunden mit vollständiger Anreizkompatibilität