48 research outputs found
Analysis of cloud storage prices
Cloud storage is fast securing its role as a major repository for both
consumers and business customers. Many companies now offer storage solutions,
sometimes for free for limited amounts of capacity. We have surveyed the
pricing plans of a selection of major cloud providers and compared them using
the unit price as the means of comparison. All the providers, excepting Amazon,
adopt a bundling pricing scheme; Amazon follows instead a block-declining
pricing policy. We compare the pricing plans through a double approach: a
pointwise comparison for each value of capacity, and an overall comparison
using a two-part tariff approximation and a Pareto-dominance criterion. Under
both approaches, most providers appear to offer pricing plans that are more
expensive and can be excluded from a procurement selection in favour of a
limited number of dominant providers.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures, 17 reference
Spectrum Trading: An Abstracted Bibliography
This document contains a bibliographic list of major papers on spectrum
trading and their abstracts. The aim of the list is to offer researchers
entering this field a fast panorama of the current literature. The list is
continually updated on the webpage
\url{http://www.disp.uniroma2.it/users/naldi/Ricspt.html}. Omissions and papers
suggested for inclusion may be pointed out to the authors through e-mail
(\textit{[email protected]})
Construction of an SDE Model from Intraday Copper Futures Prices
This paper introduces a model for intraday copper futures prices based on a stochastic differential equation (SDE). In particular, we derive an SDE that fits the model to the data and that is based on the whitening filter approach, a method characterizing linear time-variant systems. This method is applied to construct a model able to simulate the trajectories of copper futures prices, statistically described by means of an empirical autocorrelation approach. We show that the predictability of copper futures prices is rather weak. In fact, the developed model produces trajectories close to the actual data only in the short term. Consequently, the investment risk for copper futures is high. We also show that the performance of the model improves significantly if the time series satisfy particular conditions, e.g., those with a determinism measure
Agent-Based Models for Opinion Formation: A Bibliographic Survey
Agent-based models are now largely adopted to describe how opinions emerge in a group of people. This survey provides an analysis of the literature on the subject, highlighting the major characteristics of such models. Over the last decade, the number of papers has grown at an overall annual rate of 16%, though not continually. Two communities contribute to the research effort: physics and control systems. However, their mutual awareness and collaboration are rather low. The prevailing mechanism adopted to describe the interaction among the agents is bilateral, but not symmetric. In most cases, the opinion is described by a continuous variable. Just a few papers consider a utility function for the agents
Pricing Options with Vanishing Stochastic Volatility
In the past years, there has been an extensive investigation of the class of stochastic volatility models for the evaluation of options and complex derivatives. These models have proven to be extremely useful in generalizing the classic Black–Scholes economy and accounting for discrepancies between observation and predictions in the simple log-normal, constant-volatility model. In this paper, we study the structure of an options market with a stochastic volatility that will eventually
vanish (i.e., reaches zero) for very short periods of time with probability of one. We investigate the form of pricing measures in this situation, first in a simple binomial case, and then for a diffusion model, by constructing a weak approximation in discrete space and continuous time. The market described allows fleeting arbitrage opportunities, since a vanishing volatility prevents the construction of an equivalent measure, so that pricing contingent claims are, a priori, not obvious. Nevertheless, we can still produce a fair pricing equation. Let us note that this issue is not only of theoretical relevance, as the phenomenon of very low volatility has indeed been observed in the financial markets
and the economy for quite a long time in the recent past