We consider the problem of randomly assigning n indivisible objects to n agents. Recent research introduced a promising mechanism, the probabilistic serial that has superior e¢ ciency properties than the most common real-life mechanism random priority. On the other hand, mechanisms based on Gale’s celebrated top trading cycles method have long dominated the indivisible goods literature (with th...

This paper examines the efŽ ciency of electric power generation plants in the United States. A 1996 data set from the Utility Data Institute and county-level wage data from the Bureau of Labor statistics provide the information needed to construct measures of cost, output, and input prices for 78 steam plants using natural gas as the primary fuel. This paper uses a Bayesian stochastic frontier ...

The e ciency of pattern recognition is particularly crucial in two situations; whenever there are a large number of classes to discriminate, and, whenever recognition must be performed a large number of times. We develop a number of algorithms to cope with the demands of these di cult conditions. The algorithms achieve high e ciency by using pattern rejectors. A pattern rejector is a generaliza...

The goal of network design is to meet the needs of resi dent applications in an e cient manner Adding real time service and point to multipoint multicast routing to the In ternet s traditional point to point best e ort service model will greatly increase the Internet s e ciency in handling point to multipoint real time applications Recently the RSVP resource reservation protocol has introduced ...

Real-time strategy (RTS) games are popular and many different games exist. Despite the existence of basic similarities among different games, the engines of these games are often built ad hoc, and code re-use among di erent titles is minimal. We abstract one such similarity into a new design pattern, and implement the design pattern and its language abstraction in the Casanova programming langu...

Most commonly used similarity search methods in genomic sequences are heuristic ones.These are based upon text ltering that allows one to infer potential regions of similarity. Thisthesis proposes new lter de nitions to search for similarities in genomic sequences, and fastalgorithms to measure the e ciency of these lters.More precisely, we study the spaced seed model and propos...

We study auctions under restricted communication. Bidders have valuations in a compact interval, but can only report one of a …nite number of messages. We provide a characterization of welfare as well as revenue maximizing auctions in the symmetric independent private values case when bidders report simultaneously. We show that the seller choosing how to allocate the …xed communication capacity...

This paper deals with the optimal time to invest in an energy e¢ ciency enhancement. There is a broad consensus that such investments quickly pay for themselves in lower energy bills and spared emission allowances. However, investments that at …rst glance seem worthwhile usually are not undertaken. Our aim is to shed some light on this issue. In particular, we try to assess these projects from ...

Nisan and Segal (forthcoming) show that when verifying the e¢ ciency of a combinatorial allocation, without increasing the communication burden one can restrict attention to announcing a price equilibrium. We …nd that a parallel conjecture for deterministic communication fails: We demonstrate a class of valuations for which the restriction to “demand queries,” which ask agents to report their p...

Economists have long been fascinated by the sources of variations in the stock market. By the early 1970’s a consensus had emerged among …nancial economists suggesting that stock prices could be well approximated by a random walk model and that changes in stock returns were basically unpredictable. Fama (1970) provides an early, de…nitive statement of this position. Historically, the ‘random wa...