The Timing of Bid Placement and Extent of Multiple Bidding: An Empirical Investigation Using eBay Online Auctions

Online auctions are fast gaining popularity in today's electronic commerce. Relative to offline auctions, there is a greater degree of multiple bidding and late bidding in online auctions, an empirical finding by some recent research. These two behaviors (multiple bidding and late bidding) are of ``strategic'' importance to online auctions and hence important to investigate. In this article we empirically measure the distribution of bid timings and the extent of multiple bidding in a large set of online auctions, using bidder experience as a mediating variable. We use data from the popular auction site \url{www.eBay.com} to investigate more than 10,000 auctions from 15 consumer product categories. We estimate the distribution of late bidding and multiple bidding, which allows us to place these product categories along a continuum of these metrics (the extent of late bidding and the extent of multiple bidding). Interestingly, the results of the analysis distinguish most of the product categories from one another with respect to these metrics, implying that product categories, after controlling for bidder experience, differ in the extent of multiple bidding and late bidding observed in them. We also find a nonmonotonic impact of bidder experience on the timing of bid placements. Experienced bidders are ``more'' active either toward the close of auction or toward the start of auction. The impact of experience on the extent of multiple bidding, though, is monotonic across the auction interval; more experienced bidders tend to indulge ``less'' in multiple bidding.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000123 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Functional characterization of TRIM24 and TRIM32 proteins in the heart through their interaction with Dysbindin

Ubiquitination is one of the important post-translational modifications and a vital cellular process involved in various tasks of targeted protein degradation via the Ubiquitin-Proteasome system (UPS), intracellular signaling, cell death, transcriptional control, etc. Importantly, it prevents the aggregation of non-functional, misfolded, and potentially harmful proteins to maintain protein homeostasis. Ubiquitination is accomplished by the concerted action of three enzymatic steps involving E1 activating enzymes, E2 conjugating enzymes, and E3 ligases. Tripartite motif-containing (TRIM) proteins are one of the integral members of E3 ubiquitin ligases in metazoans, modulating essential cellular pathways. For long, MuRFs (Muscle ring finger proteins) were the most extensively studied TRIMs for their cardiac function. Recent advances in the field, however, have demonstrated broader and ever-increasing reports of various TRIM E3 ligases in the (patho-) physiology of the heart. A schizophrenia susceptibility protein, Dysbindin was reported by our group to also play a role in the heart and to be the robust inducer of cardiomyocyte hypertrophy via activation of Rho-dependent serum-response factor (SRF) signaling pathway. A Yeast two-hybrid screen was performed using Dysbindin as bait against a human cardiac cDNA library to identify the cardiac Dysbindin interactome. Among several putative binding proteins, TRIM24 was identified and confirmed to be interacting with Dysbindin by experimental methods of co-immunoprecipitation and co-immunostaining. Another TRIM family protein, TRIM32, has earlier been reported as an E3 ubiquitin ligase for Dysbindin in skeletal muscle. Consistently, TRIM32 degraded Dysbindin in neonatal rat ventricular cardiomyocytes (NRVCMs) as well. Surprisingly, however, TRIM24 did not promote Dysbindin decay but rather protected Dysbindin against possible degradation by TRIM32. Correspondingly, TRIM32 attenuated the activation of SRF signaling and hypertrophy through Dysbindin decay, whereas TRIM24 promoted Dysbindin-induced hypertrophic effects in NRVCMs. Further experiments in this study also signify that TRIM32 is a key regulator of cell viability and apoptosis in cardiomyocytes via simultaneous activation of p53 and caspase-3/-7 and inhibition of X-linked inhibitor of apoptosis. In conclusion, we here provide a novel mechanism of post-translational regulation of Dysbindin and hypertrophy via TRIM24 and TRIM32 and show the importance of TRIM32 in cardiomyocyte apoptosis in vitro

On robust and secure wireless communication system design using software-defined radios

This dissertation is composed of three parts: airborne multi input multi output (MIMO) communications, physical layer authentication, and software radio design for DARPA Spectrum Challenge. A common theme for the three distinct problems is the system perspective that we have adopted throughout this dissertation. Instead of considering isolated issues within these problems, we have provided a holistic design approach to the three problems and have implemented all three systems using the GNU Radio/USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) platform. In the first part, we develop a MIMO communication system for airborne platforms. MIMO communication has long been considered to be suitable only for environment that is rich in scatterers. This, unfortunately is not the case for airborne platforms. However, this lack of scattering can be compensated by the large aperture of the airborne MIMO platform; this is corroborated by our careful analysis using real measurement data. Our analysis of the airborne MIMO channels leads to the development of a variable rate MIMO transceiver architecture. This architecture is numerically shown to improve the bit error rate (BER) over conventional transceiver architectures that are developed for rich scattering environments. A software radio based MIMO system is then implemented to demonstrate experimentally the efficacy of the developed architecture. In the second part, we develop a physical layer authentication scheme as a counter measure to primary user emulation attack (PUEA) in cognitive radio (CR) networks. In this attack, a malicious user emulates the signal characteristics of the primary user (PU) when it is silent which prevents unsuspecting secondary user (SU) from utilizing the network. The developed physical layer authentication is based on embedding cryptographic hash signatures, referred to as authentication tags, within PU\u27s signal constellations. The embedding is performed such that the legacy receivers are not affected. We analyze the scheme using the fast fading Rayleigh channel model and present an optimal scheme to embed signals in PU\u27s constellations which minimizes the tag BER. Experimental results are obtained that corroborate our theoretical claims, thereby establish that reliable authentication can be achieved without sacrificing signal quality at the primary receivers. In the final part, we describe in detail our design of software radios developed as part of the DARPA Spectrum Challenge (DSC), a year long competition that started in January 2013 and concluded in March 2014 with the final tournament held in Arlington, VA at the DARPA headquarter. DSC was comprised of two tournaments, competitive and cooperative. In the competitive mode two radio pairs, each composed of a transmitter and a receiver, are pitted against each other to transmit the most amount of data error-free while operating concurrently in the same frequency band. In the cooperative mode, three radio pairs have to share a frequency band in a cooperative manner wherein the goal is to maximize the throughput of all the three pairs. We describe the design of our software radio system that integrates some key technologies crucial in operating in an environment that does not allow user coordination and spectrum pre-planning, including: spectrum sensing, adaptive transmission both in spectrum utilization and transmission rate, opportunistic jamming, and sliding window feedback. The developed radio is robust in the presence of unknown interference and achieves the desired balance between throughput and reliability in an uncoordinated transmission environment

Harmonic Mitigation Using a Polarized Ramp-time Current-Controlled Inverter

 This paper describes the implementation of a shunt active power filter for a three-phase four-wire system to overcome the power quality problems generated by mixed non-linear loads which are a combination of harmonic, reactive and unbalanced components. The filter consists of a three-phase current-controlled voltage source inverter (CC-VSI) with a filter inductor at the AC output and a DC-bus capacitor. The CC-VSI is operated to directly control the grid current in order to be sinusoidal and in phase with the grid voltage without sensing the load currents. The switching is controlled by using polarized ramp-time current control, which is based on the concept of zero average current error (ZACE) with a fixed switching frequency. The laboratory experiment results indicate that the filter is able to mitigate the harmonics and the reactive power, so that the grid currents are sinusoidal, in phase with the grid voltages, and symmetric although the grid voltage contains harmonics