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ÂżâCrowdfundingâ como finanzas democrĂĄticas? Comprender cĂłmo y por quĂ© los inversores del Reino Unido confĂan en estos mercados [Crowdfunding as democratic finance? Understanding how and why UK investors trust these markets]
Can crowdfunding contribute to the rebalancing of the financial system via democratising investment? This paper begins to respond to this question by establishing how and why investors place trust in these markets. We offer two contributions. First, to theoretical debates on democratic finance; and second, to a more empirical body of cross-disciplinary research into popular investment via a qualitative analysis of 52 original interviews with investors in six UK crowdfunding markets. Our data is taken from a project with the UKâs Financial Conduct Authority to enhance investor protection in these markets. Using an economic sociology approach, we find that investors: mobilise embedded networks to establish trust in crowdfunding; are motivated by expectations of âblended returnsâ; prefer automated investment tools if they lack experience; and typically invest with funds they have earmarked as being prepared to lose. We conclude that enhanced investor protection is required for crowdfunding to help democratize finance
Quickest Paths in Simulations of Pedestrians
This contribution proposes a method to make agents in a microscopic
simulation of pedestrian traffic walk approximately along a path of estimated
minimal remaining travel time to their destination. Usually models of
pedestrian dynamics are (implicitly) built on the assumption that pedestrians
walk along the shortest path. Model elements formulated to make pedestrians
locally avoid collisions and intrusion into personal space do not produce
motion on quickest paths. Therefore a special model element is needed, if one
wants to model and simulate pedestrians for whom travel time matters most (e.g.
travelers in a station hall who are late for a train). Here such a model
element is proposed, discussed and used within the Social Force Model.Comment: revised version submitte
Routing Games over Time with FIFO policy
We study atomic routing games where every agent travels both along its
decided edges and through time. The agents arriving on an edge are first lined
up in a \emph{first-in-first-out} queue and may wait: an edge is associated
with a capacity, which defines how many agents-per-time-step can pop from the
queue's head and enter the edge, to transit for a fixed delay. We show that the
best-response optimization problem is not approximable, and that deciding the
existence of a Nash equilibrium is complete for the second level of the
polynomial hierarchy. Then, we drop the rationality assumption, introduce a
behavioral concept based on GPS navigation, and study its worst-case efficiency
ratio to coordination.Comment: Submission to WINE-2017 Deadline was August 2nd AoE, 201
Activity-specific mobility of adults in a rural region of western Kenya
Improving rural household access to resources such as markets, schools and healthcare can help alleviate poverty in low-income settings. Current models of geographic accessibility to various resources rarely take individual variation into account due to a lack of appropriate data, yet understanding mobility at an individual level is key to knowing how people access their local resources. Our study used both an activity-specific survey and GPS trackers to evaluate how adults in a rural area of western Kenya accessed local resources. We calculated the travel time and time spent at six different types of resource and compared the GPS and survey data to see how well they matched. We found links between several demographic characteristics and the time spent at different resources, and that the GPS data reflected the survey data well for time spent at some types of resource, but poorly for others. We conclude that demography and activity are important drivers of mobility, and a better understanding of individual variation in mobility could be obtained through the use of GPS trackers on a wider scale
Optimal Traffic Networks
Inspired by studies on the airports' network and the physical Internet, we
propose a general model of weighted networks via an optimization principle. The
topology of the optimal network turns out to be a spanning tree that minimizes
a combination of topological and metric quantities. It is characterized by a
strongly heterogeneous traffic, non-trivial correlations between distance and
traffic and a broadly distributed centrality. A clear spatial hierarchical
organization, with local hubs distributing traffic in smaller regions, emerges
as a result of the optimization. Varying the parameters of the cost function,
different classes of trees are recovered, including in particular the minimum
spanning tree and the shortest path tree. These results suggest that a
variational approach represents an alternative and possibly very meaningful
path to the study of the structure of complex weighted networks.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, final revised versio
Improving the Price of Anarchy for Selfish Routing via Coordination Mechanisms
We reconsider the well-studied Selfish Routing game with affine latency
functions. The Price of Anarchy for this class of games takes maximum value
4/3; this maximum is attained already for a simple network of two parallel
links, known as Pigou's network. We improve upon the value 4/3 by means of
Coordination Mechanisms.
We increase the latency functions of the edges in the network, i.e., if
is the latency function of an edge , we replace it by
with for all . Then an
adversary fixes a demand rate as input. The engineered Price of Anarchy of the
mechanism is defined as the worst-case ratio of the Nash social cost in the
modified network over the optimal social cost in the original network.
Formally, if \CM(r) denotes the cost of the worst Nash flow in the modified
network for rate and \Copt(r) denotes the cost of the optimal flow in the
original network for the same rate then [\ePoA = \max_{r \ge 0}
\frac{\CM(r)}{\Copt(r)}.]
We first exhibit a simple coordination mechanism that achieves for any
network of parallel links an engineered Price of Anarchy strictly less than
4/3. For the case of two parallel links our basic mechanism gives 5/4 = 1.25.
Then, for the case of two parallel links, we describe an optimal mechanism; its
engineered Price of Anarchy lies between 1.191 and 1.192.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, preliminary version appeared at ESA 201
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