312 research outputs found
The Effect of Divestitures in the German Electricity Market
In the most liberalized electricity markets, abuse of market power is a concern related to oligopolistic market structures, flaws in market architecture, and the specific characteristics of electricity generation and demand. Several methods have been suggested to improve the competitiveness of the liberalized electricity markets and to reallocate rents from generators to consumers. In this paper we study to what extend divestitures can improve the competitiveness of the electricity market. We quantify the expected developments under different divestiture scenarios for the German market, using Cournot and Supply Function Equilibrium simulations. We find an overall welfare gain in both models and show that those gains are highest if the divested assets are sold to independent and small firms, preventing the formation of additional firms that set prices strategically.Supply Function Equilibrium;Cournot competition;electricity markets;divestitures
Cournot Versus Supply Functions: What does the Data Tell us?
The liberalization of the electricity sector increases the need for realistic and robust models of the oligopolistic interaction of electricity firms. This paper compares the two most popular models: Cournot and the Supply Function Equilibrium (SFE), and tests which model describes the observed market data best. Using identical demand and supply specifications, both models are calibrated to the German electricity market by varying the contract cover of firms. Our results show that each model explains an identical fraction of the observed price variation. We therefore suggest using Cournot models for short term analysis, as more market details, such as network constraints, can be accommodated. As the SFE model is less sensitive to the choice of the calibration parameters, it might be more appropriate for long term analysis, such as the study of a merger.supply function equilibrium;Cournot competition;electricity markets
Cournot versus Supply Functions: What Does the Data tell us?
The liberalization of the electricity sector increases the need for realistic and robust models of the oligopolistic interaction of electricity firms. This paper compares the two most popular models: Cournot and the Supply Function Equilibrium (SFE), and tests which model describes the observed market data best. Using identical demand and supply specifications, both models are calibrated to the German electricity market by varying the contract cover of firms. Our results show that each model explains an identical fraction of the observed price variation. We therefore suggest using Cournot models for short term analysis, as more market details, such as network constraints, can be accommodated. As the SFE model is less sensitive to the choice of the calibration parameters, it might be more appropriate for long term analysis, such as the study of a merger.supply function equilibrium;Cournot competition;electricity markets
Boosting search by rare events
Randomized search algorithms for hard combinatorial problems exhibit a large
variability of performances. We study the different types of rare events which
occur in such out-of-equilibrium stochastic processes and we show how they
cooperate in determining the final distribution of running times. As a
byproduct of our analysis we show how search algorithms are optimized by random
restarts.Comment: 4 pages, 3 eps figures. References update
Coevolutionary Landscape Inference and the Context-Dependence of Mutations in Beta-Lactamase TEM-1
The quantitative characterization of mutational landscapes is a task of outstanding importance in evolutionary and medical biology: It is, for example, of central importance for our understanding of the phenotypic effect of mutations related to disease and antibiotic drug resistance. Here we develop a novel inference scheme for mutational landscapes, which is based on the statistical analysis of large alignments of homologs of the protein of interest. Our method is able to capture epistatic couplings between residues, and therefore to assess the dependence of mutational effects on the sequence context where they appear. Compared with recent large-scale mutagenesis data of the beta-lactamase TEM-1, a protein providing resistance against beta-lactam antibiotics, our method leads to an increase of about 40% in explicative power as compared with approaches neglecting epistasis. We find that the informative sequence context extends to residues at native distances of about 20 Ă
from the mutated site, reaching thus far beyond residues in direct physical contact
Entropy and typical properties of Nash equilibria in two-player games
We use techniques from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems to
analyse the properties of Nash equilibria of bimatrix games with large random
payoff matrices. By means of an annealed bound, we calculate their number and
analyse the properties of typical Nash equilibria, which are exponentially
dominant in number. We find that a randomly chosen equilibrium realizes almost
always equal payoffs to either player. This value and the fraction of
strategies played at an equilibrium point are calculated as a function of the
correlation between the two payoff matrices. The picture is complemented by the
calculation of the properties of Nash equilibria in pure strategies.Comment: 6 pages, was "Self averaging of Nash equilibria in two player games",
main section rewritten, some new results, for additional information see
http://itp.nat.uni-magdeburg.de/~jberg/games.htm
Message passing for vertex covers
Constructing a minimal vertex cover of a graph can be seen as a prototype for
a combinatorial optimization problem under hard constraints. In this paper, we
develop and analyze message passing techniques, namely warning and survey
propagation, which serve as efficient heuristic algorithms for solving these
computational hard problems. We show also, how previously obtained results on
the typical-case behavior of vertex covers of random graphs can be recovered
starting from the message passing equations, and how they can be extended.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures - version accepted for publication in PR
Stability of the replica-symmetric saddle-point in general mean-field spin-glass models
Within the replica approach to mean-field spin-glasses the transition from
ergodic high-temperature behaviour to the glassy low-temperature phase is
marked by the instability of the replica-symmetric saddle-point. For general
spin-glass models with non-Gaussian field distributions the corresponding
Hessian is a matrix with the number of replicas tending to
zero eventually. We block-diagonalize this Hessian matrix using representation
theory of the permutation group and identify the blocks related to the
spin-glass susceptibility. Performing the limit within these blocks we
derive expressions for the de~Almeida-Thouless line of general spin-glass
models. Specifying these expressions to the cases of the
Sherrington-Kirkpatrick, Viana-Bray, and the L\'evy spin glass respectively we
obtain results in agreement with previous findings using the cavity approach
Splicing factor Rbm10 facilitates heterochromatin assembly in fission yeast
Splicing factors have recently been shown to be involved in heterochromatin formation, but their role in controlling heterochromatin structure and function remains poorly understood. In this study, we identified a fission yeast homologue of human splicing factor RBM10, which has been linked to TARP syndrome. Overexpression of Rbm10 in fission yeast leads to strong global intron retention. Rbm10 also interacts with splicing factors in a pattern resembling that of human RBM10, suggesting that the function of Rbm10 as a splicing regulator is conserved. Surprisingly, our deep-sequencing data showed that deletion of Rbm10 caused only minor effect on genome-wide gene expression and splicing. However, the mutant displays severe heterochromatin defects. Further analyses confirmed that the heterochromatin defects in the mutant did not result from mis-splicing of heterochromatin factors. Our proteomic data revealed that Rbm10 associates with the histone deacetylase Clr6 complex and chromatin remodeling complexes known to be essential for heterochromatin silencing. Our work together with previous findings further suggests that different splicing subunits may play distinct roles in heterochromatin regulation
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