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Full-Text Articles in Business
Experience Me! The Impact Of Content Sampling Strategies On The Marketing Of Digital Entertainment Goods, Ai Phuong Hoang, Robert J. Kauffman
Experience Me! The Impact Of Content Sampling Strategies On The Marketing Of Digital Entertainment Goods, Ai Phuong Hoang, Robert J. Kauffman
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Product sampling allows consumers to try out a small portion of a product for free. Uncertainty associated with consumption of information goods makes sampling useful for digital entertainment providers. Firms offer some programming for free to attract consumers to purchase a series of programs. We explore the effectiveness of content sampling for information goods using a dataset containing more than 17 million free previews and purchase observations on households from a digital entertainment firm that offers video-on-demand (VoD). Based on theories related to product sampling and information goods, we analyze the relationship between free previews and VoD purchases for series …
Technology Investment Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: The Case Of Mobile Payment Systems, Robert J. Kauffman, Jun Liu, Dan Ma
Technology Investment Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: The Case Of Mobile Payment Systems, Robert J. Kauffman, Jun Liu, Dan Ma
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
The recent launch of Google Wallet has brought the issue of technology solutions in mobile payments (m-payments) to the forefront. In deciding whether and when to adopt m-payments, senior managers in banks are concerned about uncertainties regarding future market conditions, technology standards, and consumer and merchant responses, especially their willingness to adopt. This study applies economic theory and modeling for decision-making under uncertainty to bank investments in m-payment systems technology. We assess the projected benefits and costs of investment as a continuous-time stochastic process to determine optimal investment timing. We find that the value of waiting to adopt jumps when …
Prioritized Shaping Of Models For Solving Dec-Pomdps, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, William Yeoh, Prasanna Velagapudi, Paul Scerri
Prioritized Shaping Of Models For Solving Dec-Pomdps, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, William Yeoh, Prasanna Velagapudi, Paul Scerri
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
An interesting class of multi-agent POMDP planning problems can be solved by having agents iteratively solve individual POMDPs, find interactions with other individual plans, shape their transition and reward functions to encourage good interactions and discourage bad ones and then recompute a new plan. D-TREMOR showed that this approach can allow distributed planning for hundreds of agents. However, the quality and speed of the planning process depends on the prioritization scheme used. Lower priority agents shape their models with respect to the models of higher priority agents. In this paper, we introduce a new prioritization scheme that is guaranteed to …
Robust Distributed Scheduling Via Time Period Aggregation, Shih-Fen Cheng, John Tajan, Hoong Chuin Lau
Robust Distributed Scheduling Via Time Period Aggregation, Shih-Fen Cheng, John Tajan, Hoong Chuin Lau
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
In this paper, we evaluate whether the robustness of a market mechanism that allocates complementary resources could be improved through the aggregation of time periods in which resources are consumed. In particular, we study a multi-round combinatorial auction that is built on a general equilibrium framework. We adopt the general equilibrium framework and the particular combinatorial auction design from the literature, and we investigate the benefits and the limitation of time-period aggregation when demand-side uncertainties are introduced. By using simulation experiments on a real-life resource allocation problem from a container port, we show that, under stochastic conditions, the performance variation …
Decentralized Decision Support For An Agent Population In Dynamic And Uncertain Domains, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen
Decentralized Decision Support For An Agent Population In Dynamic And Uncertain Domains, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
This research is motivated by problems in urban transportation and labor mobility, where the agent flow is dynamic, non-deterministic and on a large scale. In such domains, even though the individual agents do not have an identity of their own and do not explicitly impact other agents, they have implicit interactions with other agents. While there has been much research in handling such implicit effects, it has primarily assumed controlled movements of agents in static environments. We address the issue of decision support for individual agents having involuntary movements in dynamic environments . For instance, in a taxi fleet serving …
Would Price Limits Have Made Any Difference To The 'Flash Crash' On May 6, 2010, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh
Would Price Limits Have Made Any Difference To The 'Flash Crash' On May 6, 2010, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
On May 6, 2010, the U.S. equity markets experienced a brief but highly unusual drop in prices across a number of stocks and indices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (see Figure 1) fell by approximately 9% in a matter of minutes, and several stocks were traded down sharply before recovering a short time later. The authors contend that the events of May 6, 2010 exhibit patterns consistent with the type of "flash crash" observed in their earlier study (2010). This paper describes the results of nine different simulations created by using a large-scale computer model to reconstruct the critical elements …
Managing Supply Uncertainty With An Information Market, Zhiling Guo, Fang Fang, Andrew B. Whinston
Managing Supply Uncertainty With An Information Market, Zhiling Guo, Fang Fang, Andrew B. Whinston
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
We propose a market-based information aggregation mechanism to manage the supply side uncertainty in the supply chain. In our analytical model, a simple supply chain consists of a group of retailers who order a homogeneous product from two suppliers. The two suppliers differ in their ability to fulfill orders – one always delivers orders and the other fulfills orders probabilistically. We model the supply chain decisions as a Stackelberg game where the supplier who has uncertain reliability decides a wholesale price before the retailers who independently receive signals about the supplier’s reliability determine their sourcing strategies. We then propose an …
Font Size: Make Font Size Smaller Make Font Size Default Make Font Size Larger Exploiting Coordination Locales In Distributed Pomdps Via Social Model Shaping, Pradeep Varakantham, Jun Young Kwak, Matthew Taylor, Janusz Marecki, Paul Scerri, Milind Tambe
Font Size: Make Font Size Smaller Make Font Size Default Make Font Size Larger Exploiting Coordination Locales In Distributed Pomdps Via Social Model Shaping, Pradeep Varakantham, Jun Young Kwak, Matthew Taylor, Janusz Marecki, Paul Scerri, Milind Tambe
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Distributed POMDPs provide an expressive framework for modeling multiagent collaboration problems, but NEXPComplete complexity hinders their scalability and application in real-world domains. This paper introduces a subclass of distributed POMDPs, and TREMOR, an algorithm to solve such distributed POMDPs. The primary novelty of TREMOR is that agents plan individually with a single agent POMDP solver and use social model shaping to implicitly coordinate with other agents. Experiments demonstrate that TREMOR can provide solutions orders of magnitude faster than existing algorithms while achieving comparable, or even superior, solution quality.