The Value of Information Concealment

We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if the signal is leaked or revealed. We then show that, if the seller is not allowed to make payments to the buyer, the gap between the two is bounded by a multiplicative factor of 3, if the value distribution conditioning on each signal is regular. We give examples showing that both conditions are necessary for a constant bound to hold. We connect this scenario to multi-bidder single-item auctions where bidders' values are correlated. Similarly to the setting above, we show that the revenue of a Bayesian incentive compatible, ex post individually rational auction can be arbitrarily larger than that of a dominant strategy incentive compatible auction, whereas the two are no more than a factor of 5 apart if the auctioneer never pays the bidders and if each bidder's value conditioning on the others' is drawn according to a regular distribution. The upper bounds in both settings degrade gracefully when the distribution is a mixture of a small number of regular distributions

Bidder Subset Selection Problem in Auction Design

Motivated by practical concerns in the online advertising industry, we study a bidder subset selection problem in single-item auctions. In this problem, a large pool of candidate bidders have independent values sampled from known prior distributions. The seller needs to pick a subset of bidders and run a given auction format on the selected subset to maximize her expected revenue. We propose two frameworks for the subset restrictions: (i) capacity constraint on the set of selected bidders; and (ii) incurred costs for the bidders invited to the auction. For the second-price auction with anonymous reserve (SPA-AR), we give constant approximation polynomial time algorithms in both frameworks (in the latter framework under mild assumptions about the market). Our results are in stark contrast to the previous work of Mehta, Nadav, Psomas, Rubinstein [NeurIPS 2020], who showed hardness of approximation for the SPA without a reserve price. We also give complimentary approximation results for other well-studied auction formats such as anonymous posted pricing and sequential posted pricing. On a technical level, we find that the revenue of SPA-AR as a set function $f(S)$ of its bidders $S$ is fractionally-subadditive but not submodular. Our bidder selection problem with invitation costs is a natural question about (approximately) answering a demand oracle for $f(\cdot)$ under a given vector of costs, a common computational assumption in the literature on combinatorial auctions.Comment: 17 pages. To appear at SODA 202

Driver take-over reaction in autonomous vehicles with rotatable seats

A new concept in the interior design of autonomous vehicles is rotatable or swivelling seats that allow people sitting in the front row to rotate their seats and face backwards. In the current study, we used a take-over request task conducted in a fixed-based driving simulator to compare two conditions, driver front-facing and rear-facing. Thirty-six adult drivers participated in the experiment using a within-subject design with take-over time budget varied. Take-over reaction time, remaining action time, crash, situation awareness and trust in automation were measured. Repeated measures ANOVA and Generalized Linear Mixed Model were conducted to analyze the results. The results showed that the rear-facing configuration led to longer take-over reaction time (on average 1.56 s longer than front-facing, p < 0.001), but it caused drivers to intervene faster after they turned back their seat in comparison to the traditional front-facing configuration. Situation awareness in both front-facing and rear-facing autonomous driving conditions were significantly lower (p < 0.001) than the manual driving condition, but there was no significant difference between the two autonomous driving conditions (p = 1.000). There was no significant difference of automation trust between front-facing and rear-facing conditions (p = 0.166). The current study showed that in a fixed-based simulator representing a conditionally autonomous car, when using the rear-facing driver seat configuration (where participants rotated the seat by themselves), participants had longer take-over reaction time overall due to physical turning, but they intervened faster after they turned back their seat for take-over response in comparison to the traditional front-facing seat configuration. This behavioral change might be at the cost of reduced take-over response quality. Crash rate was not significantly different in the current laboratory study (overall the average rate of crash was 11%). A limitation of the current study is that the driving simulator does not support other measures of take-over request (TOR) quality such as minimal time to collision and maximum magnitude of acceleration. Based on the current study, future studies are needed to further examine the effect of rotatable seat configurations with more detailed analysis of both TOR speed and quality measures as well as in real world driving conditions for better understanding of their safety implications

Probing cultural differences in product design and consumer evaluation using repertory grid analysis

Culture plays an essential role in the success of product design, especially in the age of a global economy where there is a high probability of discrepancy between the designer's intention and the consumer's response. However, the role of culture is often challenging to identify and measure. In the current paper, we employed Repertory Grids (RG) to investigate differences in UK and Chinese participants' evaluations of designs, which were themselves from both UK and Chinese students. The techniques of Honey's Content Analysis (HCA) and Principal Components Analysis (PCA) were applied to integrate the analysis of both the collected qualitative and quantitative data. The results show that the two groups tended to focus on a similar range of design aspects (i.e. aesthetics, form/shape, usability, creativity, and functionality), but apply different criteria in evaluating such aspects.The UK and Chinese designs were found to be distinctive from each other and tended to appeal more to the people from the same cultural background. The findings reveal the interplay between culture and design and underline the importance of integrating culture into design education

User-centered design approaches to integrating intellectual property information into early design processes with a design patent retrieval application

The relationship between intellectual property rights (IPRs) and the development of creativity is always a controversial topic. However, it has seldom been explored from the user-centered design (UCD) perspective. This paper describes how the UCD approach has been employed to develop Design Patent Retrieval Application (acronym: DsPLAi), a mobile app aimed to integrate IPRs related information into early design processes to enhance designers’ IP practice and to facilitate the creative process. Interview studies were first conducted to identify end-users’ understanding of IPRs and related practices. Next, participatory design workshops with designers and IP processionals were organized to understand the interaction between the two parties and their needs, thereby deriving requirements for DsPLAi. A prototype of the app was developed and evaluated with ten industrial designers. The prototype received positive feedback in the usability evaluation. The empirical results showed that the provision of IPRs related information at an early stage could be helpful to the design process and that the designers were positive about the use of DsPLAi in their daily design routines

Exploring personalised autonomous vehicles to influence user trust

Trust is a major determinant of acceptance of an autonomous vehicle (AV), and a lack of appropriate trust could prevent drivers and society in general from taking advantage of such technology. This paper makes a new attempt to explore the effects of personalised AVs as a novel approach to the cognitive underpinnings of drivers’ trust in AVs. The personalised AV system is able to identify the driving behaviours of users and thus adapt the driving style of the AV accordingly. A prototype of a personalised AV was designed and evaluated in a lab-based experimental study of 36 human drivers, which investigated the impact of the personalised AV on user trust when compared with manual human driving and non-personalised AVs. The findings show that a personalised AV appears to be significantly more reliable through accepting and understanding each driver’s behaviour, which could thereby increase a user’s willingness to trust the system. Furthermore, a personalised AV brings a sense of familiarity by making the system more recognisable and easier for users to estimate the quality of the automated system. Personalisation parameters were also explored and discussed to support the design of AV systems to be more socially acceptable and trustworthy

The development of a quality of life scale for informal carers for older adults

Background: The aim of the study was to develop a multidimensional quality of life instrument suitable for use among individuals across cultures who have an informal care role for older persons. Methods: Participants were informal carers of older adults in the United Kingdom (n = 308), United States (n = 164), and China (n = 131). We carried out exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of 61 items derived from the eight-factor Adult Carers Quality of Life Questionnaire with newly added items to define both traditional and nontraditional informal care roles. Results: Findings suggest a 24-item quality of life scale with a six-factor structure to caring for older adults that assesses (a) exhaustion, (b) adoption of a traditional carer role, (c) personal growth, (d) management and performance, (e) level of support, and (f) financial matters. Conclusion: We present a new scale to assess the multidimensional aspects of quality of life among those caring for older adults

Investigating user activities and the corresponding requirements for information and functions in autonomous vehicles of the future

The final publication is available at Elsevier via https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ergon.2020.103044. © 2020. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/The potential benefits of autonomous vehicles, including safety, convenience, fuel economy, and low emissions can only be achieved when consumers are comfortable with the vehicle design. There are only a limited number of user studies in the design of future autonomous vehicles, owing to the difficulties of shifting focus “from the present to the future.” An integrated method of simulator study and user enactment was applied in the research to bridge the gap between the current and the future. Thirty drivers participated in the study to experience enacted driving scenarios in an autonomous vehicle simulator. The participants were divided into two groups, i.e., driving-alone drivers and driving-with-a-passenger drivers, to investigate the effect of passenger presence. Rich data were elicited about possible in-vehicle activities, the corresponding requirements of information and functions to support any such activities. Also identified were the preferred methods of interacting with the information and functions. Passenger presence was found to have an influence on the attributes of activities undertaken as well as the preferences for in-vehicle information and functions. Dominant themes were identified in future autonomous vehicle designs, including a more flexible and adaptive design language, concerns of trust and safety, and trade-offs between safety and convenience and between privacy and social connection. Based on the findings, design implications for future autonomous vehicles are discussed.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) || S.C. [RGPIN-2015-04134] || Hefeng-Nottingham Innovative Design La