In this paper, I pursue three goals. The first is to model collusion in a way that is distinct from noncooperative collusion. The second and third are to develop a particular specification of a standard model of noncooperative collusion that permits explicit solution for equilibrium outputs and reversion thresholds and to extend this analysis to allow for a deterrence-based competition policy t...

Using a comprehensive dataset on the incidence of price-fixing across British manufacturing industries in the 1950s, I compare collusive and competitive industries and find evidence of a negative relationship between collusion and the labour productivity of larger firms relative to smaller firms. In particular, collusion is associated with a reduction or even a reversal of the productivity gap ...

By exploiting idle time on volunteer machines, desktop grids provide a way to execute large sets of tasks with negligible maintenance and low cost. Although desktop grids are attractive for cost-conscious projects, relying on external resources may compromise the correctness of application execution due to the well-known unreliability of nodes. In this paper, we consider the most challenging th...

This paper describes a robust watermarking algorithm and a collusion-secure fingerprinting scheme based on it. Watermarking robustness is obtained by using the JPEG algorithm to decide mark location and magnitude; the proposed algorithm supports multiple marking. The properties of dual binary Hamming codes are exploited to obtain a fingerprinting scheme secure against collusion of two buyers. T...

This paper will present a simple coin toss model which will illustrate the effect of collusion and its impact on the expected payoff for any given player. Such a game has direct links to community investment clubs where people are aggregating their investments. Without any knowledge about the impact of collusion such behaviour and its significant can be hard to detect. This paper will also revi...

We present an important, general class of new games, called side-choosing games (SCGs), for “gamifying” problem solving in formal sciences. Applications of SCGs include (1) peer-grading in teaching to (2) studying the evolution of knowledge in formal sciences to (3) organizing algorithm competitions. We view SCGs as a new programming language for human computation for formal problem solving and...

Digital fingerprinting is the technique used for traitor tracing in multimedia content distribution. It embeds unique customer information (e.g., customer ID) into multimedia content and generates different copies for different customers. The unique customer information can be extracted from the illegal copy and used to tell the traitor who re-distributes his copy to other unauthorized customer...

Digital fingerprinting of multimedia data involves embedding information in the content signal and offers protection to the digital rights of the content by allowing illegitimate usage of the content to be identified by authorized parties. One potential threat to fingerprinting is collusion, whereby a group of adversaries combine their individual copies in an attempt to remove the underlying fi...

Aim. The aim of the present research was verification of the hypothesis for the influence of negative sexual experiences in sexual development on the quality of partner relationships in the adult life. Special attention was given to the influence exercised by the level of erotization in the environment of the family of origin and to the experience of child sexual abuse. The quality of partner r...

Title of Dissertation: ESSAYS ON ADVERTISING AND PRICE COLLUSION Kartikeya Singh, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Deborah Minehart University of Maryland, College Park Chapter I: Persuasive advertising alters consumers’ tastes and creates brand loyalty. The established view in the economics literature is that such advertising is anti-competitive and results in higher pr...