The customers churn between service providers (SPs) due to better prices, better qualities of services or better reputation. Each provider is assumed to look for a maximized revenue, which depends on the strategy of the competitor. Several works present in the literature were based on the price as the only decision parameter, whereas others parameters such as quality of service (QoS) have a dec...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s implicit government guarantee is widely argued to cause irresponsible risk taking. Despite moral-hazard concerns, this paper presents evidence that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) more effectively managed home price risks during the 2000-2006 housing boom than private insurers. Mortgage origination data reveal that the GSEs were selecting loans with increasing...

We consider online posted-price mechanisms with limited supply. A seller has k items for sale and is facing n potential buyers (“agents”) that are arriving sequentially. Each agent is interested in buying one item. Each agent’s value for an item is an IID sample from some fixed distribution with support [0, 1]. The seller offers a take-it-or-leave-it price to each arriving agent (possibly diffe...

This paper examines three channel policies that are used in declining price environments: Price protection (P) is a mechanism under which the manufacturer pays the retailer a credit applying to the retailer’s unsold inventory when the wholesale price drops during the life cycle; midlife returns (M) allow the retailer to return units partway through the life cycle at some rebate; and end-of-life...

Bilateral contract transaction among generation companies and large consumers is attracting much attention in the electricity market. A large consumer can purchase energy from generation companies directly under a bilateral contract, which can guarantee the economic interests of both sides. However, in pursuit of more profit, the competitions in the transaction exist not only between the compan...

Shill bidding in English auctions is the use of insincere bids on the seller’s behalf to artificially drive up the price of the listing. Shilling is illegal and has become a serious problem in online auctions because it is easy for the seller to bid under false names and hence self-collude. We show that in an independent private-value (IPV) English auction where there are heterogeneous bidders ...

Many semantic models of rely-guarantee have been proposed in the literature. This paper proposes a new classification of the approaches into two groups based on their treatment of guarantee conditions. To allow a meaningful comparison, it constructs an abstract model for each group in a unified setting. The first model uses a weaker judgement and supports more general rules for atomic commands ...

The combination of mutable state and pointer aliasing is often troublesome due to non-obvious (and usually unspecified) interferences that may occur between non-local parts of the program. We present a type-based approach to statically control aliasing and mutable state in a minimalistic single-threaded procedural language with support for structures and references. By introducing views, re-com...