Mechanism Design for Team Formation

Team formation is a core problem in AI. Remarkably, little prior work has addressed the problem of mechanism design for team formation, accounting for the need to elicit agents' preferences over potential teammates. Coalition formation in the related hedonic games has received much attention, but only from the perspective of coalition stability, with little emphasis on the mechanism design objectives of true preference elicitation, social welfare, and equity. We present the first formal mechanism design framework for team formation, building on recent combinatorial matching market design literature. We exhibit four mechanisms for this problem, two novel, two simple extensions of known mechanisms from other domains. Two of these (one new, one known) have desirable theoretical properties. However, we use extensive experiments to show our second novel mechanism, despite having no theoretical guarantees, empirically achieves good incentive compatibility, welfare, and fairness.Comment: 12 page

Strategic Audit of Adidas

Adidas is a well-established brand in the world of sportswear and lifestyle clothing. In recent years, the company has been regaining success after a period of stagnation. Spurring this success is the renewed popularity of old classic shoe models and a surge in the lifestyle clothing trend. While adidas is doing well, it is not the top sportswear company in the world and is far behind in North America. In an attempt to boost the recent success even further, this thesis analyzes the current situation that adidas faces including its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. With this information as a background, this paper then discusses potential new strategies for adidas, ultimately deciding that obtaining a larger number of star athlete endorsements is a strategy that could quickly make a large impact for the company

The effects of uncertainty on optimal consumption

When marginal utility is convex and there is pure labour income uncertainty, certain results are well-known. Asset return uncertainty is often assumed to have qualitatively similar effects; see e.g. Skinner (1988). We show that this assumption is not correct. Asset return uncertainty gives rise to an additional term in the Euler equation, which by introducing a role for current cash-in-hand, may work in the opposite direction to the precautionary motive, leading to ambiguity in the slope of the expected consumption time profile. We present a linearised version of the Euler equation, and an associated closed form solution, in order to provide intuition for these results. Numerical analysis indicates that the approximation is reasonable for empirically plausible estimates of the variances of the underlying disturbances

Medical Tourism: The Role of Communication Regarding Risks and Benefits of Obtaining Medical Services Abroad.

The ever-increasing globalization of healthcare has led to a greater number of consumers using the World Wide Web for the purpose of accessing health information and medical services that transcends international borders (Kangas, 2010; Lunt, Mannion, & Exworthy, 2012; MacReady, 2007; Snyder, Crooks, Adams, Kingsbury, & Johnston, 2011). When faced with the high cost of health care or limited treatment options in the United States, more and more Americans are looking to developing countries to obtain a variety of health-related services, including cosmetic surgery, dentistry, diagnostic testing, fertility treatment, and major surgeries such as heart valve operations and organ transplants (Dalstrom, 2012; Snyder et al., 2011; Sono, Herlihy, & Bicker, 2011). The number of people buying health-related products and accessing health information and medical services in developing countries via the Internet is increasing (Lunt, Hardey, & Mannion, 2010). According to Turner (2010), in the United States, popularization of medical tourism is related to social inequalities, loss of employer-provided health insurance, rising premiums for health insur­ance, limited public funding of health care, and lack of access to affordable health care. Turner (2010) also contends that the United States, due to its large and growing population of unin­sured, under-lnsured, and people struggling to pay rising health insurance premiums, has become a leading target market for foreign medical facilities seeking international customers. In contrast to these motivators, patients from countries with less restricted health care, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, can choose to travel to foreign countries for immediate medical attention as an alternative to the long wait periods of nationalized health care systems (Boyle, 2008)

The effects of uncertainty on optimal consumption

When marginal utility is convex and there is pure labour income uncertainty, certain results are well-known. Asset return uncertainty is often assumed to have qualitatively similar effects; see e.g. Skinner (1988). We show that this assumption is not correct. Asset return uncertainty gives rise to an additional term in the Euler equation, which by introducing a role for current cash-in-hand, may work in the opposite direction to the precautionary motive, leading to ambiguity in the slope of the expected consumption time profile. We present a linearised version of the Euler equation, and an associated closed form solution, in order to provide intuition for these results. Numerical analysis indicates that the approximation is reasonable for empirically plausible estimates of the variances of the underlying disturbances.