Cloud providers have begun to allow users to bid for surplus servers on a spot market. These servers are allocated if a user’s bid price is higher than their market price and revoked otherwise. Thus, analyzing price data to derive optimal bidding strategies has become a popular research topic. In this paper, we argue that sophisticated bidding strategies do not provide any advantages over simpl...

This paper presents a model based on multilayer feedforward neural network to forecast crude oil spot price direction in the short-term, up to three days ahead. A great deal of attention was paid on finding the optimal ANN model structure. In addition, several methods of data pre-processing were tested. Our approach is to create a benchmark based on lagged value of pre-processed spot price, the...

This paper analyzes the pro-competitive effects of financial long-term contracts in oligopolistic electricity markets. This is done in a model that incorporates the main features of the industry: non-storable production, time-varying price-elastic demand, and sequential investment and production decisions. The paper considers contracts for difference that have as reference price the average spo...

This paper presents an asymptotic property of a joint spot-futures market equilibrium established in Cheng-Magi11 (1982). As speculators diversify over a large number of markets, the equilibrium risk premium converges to an asymptotic premium, the behaviour of which depends solely on the stochastic dependence between the spot price and an index of average returns on other markets. Risk arising ...

The contingent claims valuation of physical assets and financial derivatives depends critically on the specification and estimation of the stochastic process that describes the price path. Accurate valuation of claims based on competitive electricity prices has proved problematic, as electricity price data are not well represented by traditional commodity price models of Brownian motion. Observ...

Using intra-day data, this paper investigates the contribution to the price discovery of Euro and Japanese Yen exchange rates in three foreign exchange markets based on electronic trading systems: the CME GLOBEX regular futures, E-mini futures, and the EBS interdealer spot market. Contrary to evidence in equity markets and more recent evidence in foreign exchange markets, the spot market is fou...

Load serving entities providing electricity to regulated customers have an obligation to serve load that is subject to systematic and random fluctuations at fixed prices. In some jurisdictions like New Jersey, such obligations are auctioned off annually to third parties that commit to serve a fixed percentage of the fluctuating load at a fixed energy price. In either case the entity holding the...

The objective of this paper is to test how spot prices are affected by forward contracts using experimental economics. One set of tests used students to represent suppliers in an electricity auction with 1) no forward contracts, 2) permanent forward contracts, and 3) renewable forward contracts. In the latter test, the price of a new forward contract is affected by conditions in the spot market...

Designing dynamic pricing mechanisms that efficiently price resources in line with a provider’s profit maximization goal is a key challenge in cloud computing environments. Despite the large volume of research published on this topic, there is no publicly available software system implementing dynamic pricing for Infrastructure as a Service cloud spot markets. This paper presents the implementa...

Cloud computing provides an attractive computing paradigm in which computational resources are rented on-demand to users with zero capital and maintenance costs. Cloud providers offer different pricing options to meet computing requirements of a wide variety of applications. An attractive option for batch computing is spot-instances, which allows users to place bids for spare computing instance...