1,185 research outputs found
A Classroom\u27s Evolution
Based on the four texts that we read in Social Foundations of Music Education, I took some of the main points and concepts from each of these books and incorporated them into an original poetic monologue. The main question I was trying to answer was: How should teachers as transformative intellectuals navigate through the current educational system in the age of accountability to pursue equity among, in, and through education? Teachers must work to completely defy the stereotypical boundaries of education and inspire students to become investigators in the world, both in and out of the classroom
Set Theory or Higher Order Logic to Represent Auction Concepts in Isabelle?
When faced with the question of how to represent properties in a formal proof
system any user has to make design decisions. We have proved three of the
theorems from Maskin's 2004 survey article on Auction Theory using the
Isabelle/HOL system, and we have produced verified code for combinatorial
Vickrey auctions. A fundamental question in this was how to represent some
basic concepts: since set theory is available inside Isabelle/HOL, when
introducing new definitions there is often the issue of balancing the amount of
set-theoretical objects and of objects expressed using entities which are more
typical of higher order logic such as functions or lists. Likewise, a user has
often to answer the question whether to use a constructive or a
non-constructive definition. Such decisions have consequences for the proof
development and the usability of the formalization. For instance, sets are
usually closer to the representation that economists would use and recognize,
while the other objects are closer to the extraction of computational content.
In this paper we give examples of the advantages and disadvantages for these
approaches and their relationships. In addition, we present the corresponding
Isabelle library of definitions and theorems, most prominently those dealing
with relations and quotients.Comment: Preprint of a paper accepted for the forthcoming CICM 2014 conference
(cicm-conference.org/2014): S.M. Watt et al. (Eds.): CICM 2014, LNAI 8543,
Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014. 16 pages, 1 figur
Quantum Bayesian implementation
Bayesian implementation concerns decision making problems when agents have
incomplete information. This paper proposes that the traditional sufficient
conditions for Bayesian implementation shall be amended by virtue of a quantum
Bayesian mechanism. In addition, by using an algorithmic Bayesian mechanism,
this amendment holds in the macro world.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure
On-demand or Spot? Selling the cloud to risk-averse customers
In Amazon EC2, cloud resources are sold through a combination of an on-demand
market, in which customers buy resources at a fixed price, and a spot market,
in which customers bid for an uncertain supply of excess resources. Standard
market environments suggest that an optimal design uses just one type of
market. We show the prevalence of a dual market system can be explained by
heterogeneous risk attitudes of customers. In our stylized model, we consider
unit demand risk-averse bidders. We show the model admits a unique equilibrium,
with higher revenue and higher welfare than using only spot markets.
Furthermore, as risk aversion increases, the usage of the on-demand market
increases. We conclude that risk attitudes are an important factor in cloud
resource allocation and should be incorporated into models of cloud markets.Comment: Appeared at WINE 201
Bargaining over a finite set of alternatives
We analyze bilateral bargaining over a finite set of alternatives. We look for “good” ordinal solutions to such problems and show that Unanimity Compromise and Rational Compromise are the only bargaining rules that satisfy a basic set of properties. We then extend our analysis to admit problems with countably infinite alternatives. We show that, on this class, no bargaining rule choosing finite subsets of alternatives can be neutral. When rephrased in the utility framework of Nash (1950), this implies that there is no ordinal bargaining rule that is finite-valued
Welfare and Revenue Guarantees for Competitive Bundling Equilibrium
We study equilibria of markets with heterogeneous indivisible goods and
consumers with combinatorial preferences. It is well known that a
competitive equilibrium is not guaranteed to exist when valuations are not
gross substitutes. Given the widespread use of bundling in real-life markets,
we study its role as a stabilizing and coordinating device by considering the
notion of \emph{competitive bundling equilibrium}: a competitive equilibrium
over the market induced by partitioning the goods for sale into fixed bundles.
Compared to other equilibrium concepts involving bundles, this notion has the
advantage of simulatneous succinctness ( prices) and market clearance.
Our first set of results concern welfare guarantees. We show that in markets
where consumers care only about the number of goods they receive (known as
multi-unit or homogeneous markets), even in the presence of complementarities,
there always exists a competitive bundling equilibrium that guarantees a
logarithmic fraction of the optimal welfare, and this guarantee is tight. We
also establish non-trivial welfare guarantees for general markets, two-consumer
markets, and markets where the consumer valuations are additive up to a fixed
budget (budget-additive).
Our second set of results concern revenue guarantees. Motivated by the fact
that the revenue extracted in a standard competitive equilibrium may be zero
(even with simple unit-demand consumers), we show that for natural subclasses
of gross substitutes valuations, there always exists a competitive bundling
equilibrium that extracts a logarithmic fraction of the optimal welfare, and
this guarantee is tight. The notion of competitive bundling equilibrium can
thus be useful even in markets which possess a standard competitive
equilibrium
LP-based Covering Games with Low Price of Anarchy
We present a new class of vertex cover and set cover games. The price of
anarchy bounds match the best known constant factor approximation guarantees
for the centralized optimization problems for linear and also for submodular
costs -- in contrast to all previously studied covering games, where the price
of anarchy cannot be bounded by a constant (e.g. [6, 7, 11, 5, 2]). In
particular, we describe a vertex cover game with a price of anarchy of 2. The
rules of the games capture the structure of the linear programming relaxations
of the underlying optimization problems, and our bounds are established by
analyzing these relaxations. Furthermore, for linear costs we exhibit linear
time best response dynamics that converge to these almost optimal Nash
equilibria. These dynamics mimic the classical greedy approximation algorithm
of Bar-Yehuda and Even [3]
Asymmetric first-price auctions with uniform distributions: analytic solutions to the general case
While auction research, including asymmetric auctions, has grown significantly in recent years, there is still little analytical solutions of first-price auctions outside the symmetric case. Even in the uniform case, Griesmer et al. (1967) and Plum (1992) find solutions only to the case where the lower bounds of the two distributions are the same. We present the general analytical solutions to asymmetric auctions in the uniform case for two bidders, both with and without a minimum bid. We show that our solution is consistent with the previously known solutions of auctions with uniform distributions. Several interesting examples are presented including a class where the two bid functions are linear. We hope this result improves our understanding of auctions and provides a useful tool for future research in auctions
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