Trade liberalisation, technical change and skill-specific unemployment

"The aim of this paper is to formalise a two-country model of trade liberalisation and technical change with heterogenous firms and search-and-matching frictions in the labour market. By considering different sectors and factors of production we allow for comparative advantages and study the trade and technology effects within and between sectors on wages and employment of skilled and low-skilled workers. Technical change together with inter-sectoral trade has distributional consequences across the labour force, favouring the skilled against the low-skilled workers. Intra-sectoral trade counteracts as it increases the demand for low-skilled workers, too. The overall effects on wages and employment of skilled and low-skilled workers depend on the extent of technical change, inter-sectoral trade and intra-sectoral trade." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Handel, technischer Fortschritt, ökonomische Theorie, Hochqualifizierte, Niedrigqualifizierte, Lohnelastizität, Beschäftigungseffekte

Havens: Explicit Reliable Memory Regions for HPC Applications

Supporting error resilience in future exascale-class supercomputing systems is a critical challenge. Due to transistor scaling trends and increasing memory density, scientific simulations are expected to experience more interruptions caused by transient errors in the system memory. Existing hardware-based detection and recovery techniques will be inadequate to manage the presence of high memory fault rates. In this paper we propose a partial memory protection scheme based on region-based memory management. We define the concept of regions called havens that provide fault protection for program objects. We provide reliability for the regions through a software-based parity protection mechanism. Our approach enables critical program objects to be placed in these havens. The fault coverage provided by our approach is application agnostic, unlike algorithm-based fault tolerance techniques.Comment: 2016 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC '16), September 2016, Waltham, MA, US

Risk Aversion Pays in the Class of 2 x 2 Games with No Pure Equilibrium

Simulations indicated that, in the class of 2 x 2 games which only have a mixed equilibrium, payoffs are increased by risk aversion compared to risk neutrality. In this paper I show that the total expected payoff to a player over this class in equilibrium is indeed higher if this player is risk averse than if he is risk neutral provided that all games are played with the same probability. Furthermore, I show that for two subclasses of games more risk aversion is always better, while for a third subclass an intermediate level of risk aversion is preferable.risk aversion; mixed strategy equilibria

A Reliability Study of Parallelized VNF Chaining

In this paper, we study end-to-end service reliability in Data Center Networks (DCN) with flow and Service Function Chains (SFCs) parallelism. In our approach, we consider large flows to i) be split into multiple parallel smaller sub-flows; ii) SFC along with their VNFs are replicated into at least as many VNF instances as there are sub-flows, resulting in parallel sub-SFCs; and iii) all sub-flows are distributed over multiple shortest paths and processed in parallel by parallel sub-SFCs. We study service reliability as a function of flow and SFC parallelism and placement of parallel active and backup sub-SFCs within DCN. Based on the probability theory and by considering both server and VNF failures, we analytically derive for each studied VNF placement method the probability that all sub-flows can be successfully processed by the parallelized SFC without service interruption. We evaluate the amount of backup VNFs required to protect the parallelized SFC with a certain level of service reliability. The results show that the proposed flow and SFC parallelism in DCN can significantly increase end-to-end service reliability, while reducing the amount of backup VNFs required, as compared to traditional SFCs with serial traffic flows

A Proxy Bidding Mechanism that Elicits all Bids in an English Clock Auction Experiment

This paper reconsiders experimental tests of the English clock auction. We point out why the standard procedure can only use a small subset of all bids, which gives rise to a selection bias. We propose an alternative yet equivalent format that makes all bids visible, and apply it to a “wallet auction” experiment. Finally, we test the theory against various alternative hypotheses, and compare the results with those that would have been obtained if one had used the standard procedure. Our results confirm that the standard tests are subject to a significant selection bias