In this paper we model the behavior of a risk averse agent who seeks to maximize expected utility and who has an indivisible asset and a timing option over when to sell this asset. Our main contribution is to show that, contrary to intuition, optimal behavior for such a risk averse agent can include risk increasing gambles. For example, a manager with a choice over when to disinvest from a proj...

computer programs is quite limited. Over the past several years a number of knowledge based systems have been developed, and this experience has provided us with a handfull of techniques we can apply in a few domains. What we don't have yet is much of an appreciation of why these techniques work or of the limits of their usefulness In order to take this next step, we need more data. Unfoitunate...

This paper presents a federated search and social recommendation widget. It describes the widget’s interface and the underlying social recommendation engine. A preliminary evaluation of the widget’s usability and usefulness involving 15 subjects is also discussed. The evaluation helped identify usability problems that will be addressed prior to the widget’s usage in a real learning context.

An insider is an agent who has access to larger information than the one given by the development of the market events and who takes advantage of this in optimizing his position in the market . In this paper we consider the optimization problem of an insider who is so influential in the market to affect the price dynamics: in this sense he is called a “large” insider. The optimal portfolio prob...

Increased attention has been paid in recent years to deviations from the standard neoclassical model of consumer behavior. A substantial segment of this work focuses on reference-dependent preferences where there is a change in the shape of the utility function at some base (reference) level of income or consumption. These models have strong predictions for how responses to changes in prices ar...

The performance of a given portfolio policy can in principle be evaluated by comparing its expected utility with that of the optimal policy. Unfortunately, the optimal policy is usually not computable, in which case a direct comparison is impossible. In this paper, we solve this problem by using the given portfolio policy to construct an upper bound on the unknown maximum expected utility. This...

Wediscuss a discretization-based solution approach for a classic problem in global 1 optimization, namely the distance geometry problem (DGP).We focus our attention on a par1 2 ticular class of the DGP which is concerned with the identification of the conformation of 3 biological molecules. Among the many relevant ideas for the discretization of the DGP in 4 the literature, we identify the most...

In this paper we present our approach to several common problems in reverse engineering that are built around the Columbus framework. Columbus defines several fundamental building blocks for the use in reverse engineering processes, and as such it can be an important player in the studies conducted at the workshop for Empirical Studies in Reverse Engineering. The Columbus framework proved its u...

The construction of business process models has become an important requisite in the analysis and optimization of processes. The success of the analysis and optimization efforts heavily depends on the quality of the models. Therefore, a research domain emerged that studies the process of process modeling. This paper contributes to this research by presenting a way of visualizing the different s...

Adapting Spoken Dialogue Systems to the user is supposed to result in more efficient and successful dialogues. In this work, we present an evaluation of a quality-adaptive strategy with a user simulator adapting the dialogue initiative dynamically during the ongoing interaction and show that it outperforms conventional non-adaptive strategies and a random strategy. Furthermore, we indicate a co...