H should a firm design a price/lead-time menu and scheduling policy to maximize revenues from heterogeneous time-sensitive customers with private information about their preferences? We consider this question for a queueing system with two customer types and provide the following results. First, we develop a novel problem formulation and solution method that combines the achievable region appro...

This paper extends previous research on congested service facilities to generalized service distributions, a significant extension given the limitations of exponential distributions for networked computer job modeling. Building on the framework first presented in Mendelson and Whang (1990), we present fundamental theorems for non-priority M/G/1 queues, nonpreemptive M/G/1 queues, and preemptive...

Title of dissertation: ON THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF INCENTIVE MECHANISMS IN NETWORK SCIENCE Yang Gao, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor K. J. Ray Liu Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering With the rapid development of communication, computing and signal processing technologies, the last decade has witnessed a proliferation of emerging networks and syste...

This paper considers the coordinated radio resource allocation problem for users which are simultaneously covered by multiple overlapping heterogeneous wireless networks. As the resource allocation decision depends on the channel measurement and feedback from users, inefficiency and instability arise if a selfish user can manipulate its measured channel state to increase its gain from network. ...

Pavlovian cues for rewards become endowed with incentive salience, guiding "wanting" to their learned reward. Usually, cues are "wanted" only if their rewards have ever been "liked," but here we show that mesocorticolimbic systems can recompute "wanting" de novo by integrating novel physiological signals with a cue's preexisting associations to an outcome that lacked hedonic value. That is, a c...

Most R&D projects are executed by employing teams of researchers and in distinct phases. These two features distinguish the agency problem that a firm faces with respect to its inhouse R&D unit from traditional principal-agent problems. This paper analyzes this agency problem by studying a continuous-time multi-agent incentive problem in which a principal hires two risk-averse agents to perform...

In this paper, a salary-plus-bonus incentive mechanism is proposed to motivate WiFi Access Points (APs) to provide data offloading service for mobile network operators (MNOs). Under the proposed salary-plus-bonus scheme, WiFi APs are rewarded not only based on offloaded data volume but also based on the quality of their offloading service. The interactions between WiFi APs and the MNO under thi...

Motivation. The recent literature on mechanism design provides a series of studies on robustness issues, motivated by the idea that a desirable mechanism should not rely too heavily on the agents’ common knowledge structure (Wilson, 1985). One approach is to adopt stronger solution concepts that are insensitive to various common knowledge assumptions, such as dominant-strategy incentive compati...

Users who join a peer-to-peer network have, in general, suboptimal incentives to contribute to the network, because of the externalities that exist between them. The result is an inefficient network where the overall levels of contribution are less than would be the case if each peer acted in the interests of the entire network of peers. Incentives provided in the form of prices or contribution...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate inspiratory volume in patients undergoing cardiac surgery and to determine the effects that incentive spirometry (IS) and the breath stacking (BS) technique have on the recovery of FVC in such patients. METHODS A prospective, controlled, randomized clinical trial involving 35 patients undergoing cardiac surgery at the Hospital de Força Aérea do Galeão (HFAG, Galeão Air F...