Incentives And Two Sided Matching Engineering Coordination Mechanisms For Social Clouds

The Social Cloud framework leverages existing relationships between members of a social network for the exchange of resources. This thesis focuses on the design of coordination mechanisms to address two challenges in this scenario. In the first part, user participation incentives are studied. In the second part, heuristics for two-sided matching-based resource allocation are designed and evaluated.

The Social Cloud framework leverages existing relationships between members of a social network for the exchange of resources. This thesis focuses on the design of coordination mechanisms to address two challenges in this scenario. In the first part, user participation incentives are studied. In the second part, heuristics for two-sided matching-based resource allocation are designed and evaluated. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Business Analytics for Decision Making, the first complete text suitable for use in introductory Business Analytics courses, establishes a national syllabus for an emerging first course at an MBA or upper undergraduate level. This timely text is mainly about model analytics, particularly analytics for constrained optimization. It uses implementations that allow students to explore models and data for the sake of discovery, understanding, and decision making. Business analytics is about using data and models to solve various kinds of decision problems. There are three aspects for those who want to make the most of their analytics: encoding, solution design, and post-solution analysis. This textbook addresses all three. Emphasizing the use of constrained optimization models for decision making, the book concentrates on post-solution analysis of models. The text focuses on computationally challenging problems that commonly arise in business environments. Unique among business analytics texts, it emphasizes using heuristics for solving difficult optimization problems important in business practice by making best use of methods from Computer Science and Operations Research. Furthermore, case studies and examples illustrate the real-world applications of these methods. The authors supply examples in Excel®, GAMS, MATLAB®, and OPL. The metaheuristics code is also made available at the book's website in a documented library of Python modules, along with data and material for homework exercises. From the beginning, the authors emphasize analytics and de-emphasize representation and encoding so students will have plenty to sink their teeth into regardless of their computer programming experience.

Two-sided matching provides a model of search processes such as those between firms and workers in labor markets or between buyers and sellers in auctions. This book gives a comprehensive account of recent results concerning the game-theoretic analysis of two-sided matching. The focus of the book is on the stability of outcomes, on the incentives that different rules of organization give to agents, and on the constraints that these incentives impose on the ways such markets can be organized. The results for this wide range of related models and matching situations help clarify which conclusions depend on particular modeling assumptions and market conditions, and which are robust over a wide range of conditions.

This book probes the stable marriage problem and its variants as a rich source of problems and ideas that illustrate both the design and analysis of efficient algorithms. It covers the most recent structural and algorithmic work on stable matching problems, simplifies and unifies many earlier proofs, strengthens several earlier results, and presents new results and more efficient algorithms. The authors develop the structure of the set of stable matchings in the stable marriage problem in a more general and algebraic context than has been done previously; they discuss the problem's structure in terms of rings of sets, which allows many of the most useful features to be seen as features of a more general set of problems. The relationship between the structure of the stable marriage problem and the more general stable roommates problem is demonstrated, revealing many commonalities. The results the authors obtain provide an algorithmic response to the practical, and political, problems created by the asymmetry inherent in the Gale Shapley solutions, leading to alternative methods and better compromises than are provided by the Gale Shapley method. And, in contrast to Donald Knuth's earlier work which primarily focused on the application of mathematics to the analysis of algorithms, this book illustrates the productive and almost inseparable relationship between mathematical insight and the design of efficient algorithms. Dan Gusfield is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Robert W. Irving is Senior Lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. The Stable Marriage Problem is included in the Foundations of Computing Series, edited by Michael Garey and Albert Meyer.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

This book examines issues and implications of digital and social media marketing for emerging markets. These markets necessitate substantial adaptations of developed theories and approaches employed in the Western world. The book investigates problems specific to emerging markets, while identifying new theoretical constructs and practical applications of digital marketing. It addresses topics such as electronic word of mouth (eWOM), demographic differences in digital marketing, mobile marketing, search engine advertising, among others. A radical increase in both temporal and geographical reach is empowering consumers to exert influence on brands, products, and services. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and digital media are having a significant impact on the way people communicate and fulfil their socio-economic, emotional and material needs. These technologies are also being harnessed by businesses for various purposes including distribution and selling of goods, retailing of consumer services, customer relationship management, and influencing consumer behaviour by employing digital marketing practices. This book considers this, as it examines the practice and research related to digital and social media marketing.

This book presents an overview of the key debates that took place during the Economic and Social Council meetings at the 2007 High-level Segment, at which ECOSOC organized its first biennial Development Cooperation Forum. The discussions also revolved around the theme of the second Annual Ministerial Review, "Implementing the internationally agreed goals and commitments in regard to sustainable development."--P. 4 of cover.