Collusion, competition and piracy

In this paper we analyze firms' ability to tacitly collude on pricesin an infinitely repeated duopoly game of vertical productdifferentiation. We show that firms collude if and only if their discountfactor is high enough, i.e. if they value future profits sufficiently. We alsoshow that a lower cost of copying facilitates collusion but that a higherquality of the copy hinders collusion. Thus, the overall effect of thesenew characteristics of copies made by consumers is ambiguous.Collusion, competition, piracy, consumers, cost of copying,

WHY DOES THE PIRATE DECIDE TO BE THE LEADER IN PRICES?

We analyze the roles of the government and the incumbent in preventing piracy, and the reasons and incentives why a pirate would want to be a leader in prices. The framework of analysis used is a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation with price competition, where both incumbent and pirate are committed to keep their prices. We find that both government and incumbent have a key role in avoiding the entry of the pirate. We show that the government will not help the incumbent to become a monopolist, even if he installs an antipiracy system, because a monopoly provides the lowest social welfare. However, he will let the pirate enters as a follower or as a leader, or encourage the incumbent to deter the entry of the pirate, which depends on the technology of the government for monitoring piracy. The pirate decides to become a leader to avoid being brought down by the incumbent and the government, although the leader's profit is lower than the follower's profit. Finally, we find that high-income countries with cheaper monitoring technology have lower piracy rates.Pirate, Incumbent, Government, Price Leadership, Copy, Monitoring Piracy, Income

Lobbyin to prevent commercial piracy

In this paper we develop a common agency model to analyze the problem of pirates entering the market, in which the incumbent and the consumers form pressure groups to lobby the government on policies to prevent piracy while the pirates try to avoid being stopped. We show that a monopoly is not an equilibrium when both the incumbent and consumers lobby the government, and that the cost of monitoring commercial piracy is very important in determining (truthful) equilibria, as is the case where there is no lobby competition. However, it is now more difficult getting the pirate to enter the market.Common Agency, Lobbying, Commercial Piracy, Incumbent, Consumers and Government

Marker-based filtering of bilingual phrase pairs for SMT

State-of-the-art statistical machine translation systems make use of a large translation table obtained after scoring a set of bilingual phrase pairs automatically extracted from a parallel corpus. The number of bilingual phrase pairs extracted from a pair of aligned sentences grows exponentially as the length of the sentences increases; therefore, the number of entries in the phrase table used to carry out the translation may become unmanageable, especially when online, 'on demand' translation is required in real time. We describe the use of closed-class words to filter the set of bilingual phrase pairs extracted from the parallel corpus by taking into account the alignment information and the type of the words involved in the alignments. On four European language pairs, we show that our simple yet novel approach can filter the phrase table by up to a third yet still provide competitive results compared to the baseline. Furthermore, it provides a nice balance between the unfiltered approach and pruning using stop words, where the deterioration in translation quality is unacceptably high

Temperature modelling and model predictive control of a pilot-scale batch reaction system

The temperature control equipment on a pilot scale batch reaction system located at EAFIT University in Medelln, Colombia, is modeled and a new controller is designed aiming at using it in the reactor current PLC-based control system. Some mathematical models are developed from experimental data to describe the system behavior and using them several model based predictive controllers are designed. The simplest, yet reliable, model obtained is an ARX polynomial model of order (1,1,1) that yields a four states ane model for which an explicit MPC was calculated. This controller has a reduced mathematical complexity and can probably be used directly on the existing control system.Preprin

Hybrid rule-based - example-based MT: feeding apertium with sub-sentential translation units

This paper describes a hybrid machine translation (MT) approach that consists of integrating bilingual chunks (sub-sentential translation units) obtained from parallel corpora into an MT system built using the Apertium free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform, which uses a shallow-transfer translation approach. In the integration of bilingual chunks, special care has been taken so as not to break the application of the existing Apertium structural transfer rules, since this would increase the number of ungrammatical translations. The method consists of (i) the application of a dynamic-programming algorithm to compute the best translation coverage of the input sentence given the collection of bilingual chunks available; (ii) the translation of the input sentence as usual by Apertium; and (iii) the application of a language model to choose one of the possible translations for each of the bilingual chunks detected. Results are reported for the translation from English-to-Spanish, and vice versa, when marker-based bilingual chunks automatically obtained from parallel corpora are used