Combinatorial auctions where agents can bid on bundles of items are desirable because they allow the agents to express complementarity and substitutability between the items. However, expressing one’s preferences can require bidding on all bundles. Selective incremental preference elicitation by the auctioneer was recently proposed to address this problem but the idea was not evaluated. In this...

At present, the per capita generation of solid waste in Malaysia varies from 0.45 to 2kg/day depending on the economic status of an area. In general, the per capita generation rate is about 1kg/day. Even though 17,000 tonnes/day of solid waste is being generated, only 5% is being recycled. If this particular scenario continues without appropriate mitigation, Malaysia will be facing a serious pr...

Market mechanisms are deemed promising for distributed resource allocation settings by explicitly involving users into the allocation process. The market considers the users’ and providers’ valuations to generate efficient resource allocations and prices. In theory, valuations are assumed to be known to the user. In practice, however, this is not the case. It is a complex burden for both users ...

A number of recent papers in environmental economics have focused on the process of researching preferences – agents are uncertain about preferences but with effort may narrow their uncertainty. This issue has arisen in formulating bids in contingent valuation as well as the debate over the divergence between WTP and WTA. In the context of contingent valuation, it has been suggested that the hy...

We propose an active learning algorithm that learns a continuous valuation model from discrete preferences. The algorithm automatically decides what items are best presented to an individual in order to find the item that they value highly in as few trials as possible, and exploits quirks of human psychology to minimize time and cognitive burden. To do this, our algorithm maximizes the expected...

Electronic markets are based on classic market design assumptions that often do not hold. This thesis examines the conflict between theory and practice for the class of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms (VCG) and the auctions it has inspired in electronic commerce, most notably the iterative auctions found on eBay. VCG mechanisms provide bidders with an optimal strategy to truthfully reveal thei...

Group decision is usually understood as the reduction of different individual preferences on a given set to a single collective preference. At present, there are few approaches which solve the group ranking problem with multiple criteria in a widely acceptable way. Often, they rest on a poor heuristic which makes a decision about consensus ranking difficult to support. This paper presents an ex...

Combinatorial auctions where agents can bid on bundles of items are desirable because they allow the agents to express complementarity and substitutability between the items. However, expressing one’s preferences can require bidding on all bundles. Selective incremental preference elicitation by the auctioneer was recently proposed to address this problem [4], but the idea was not evaluated. In...

Time preference has a peculiar role in determining the level of economic activities. Time preferenceis the most important origin of interest rate. In this paper we study the founders and defenders'viewpoints about time preference and then we try to criticize them. It seems that discounting futureutilities is resulting from irrationality and it is ethically indefensible too. From mathematical as...

Results: Out of the 263 eligible couples, 136 (52%) couples (male 61% and female 39%) were found to be contraceptive users. Sociodemographic factors significantly associated with current contraceptive use were age (21-25 years) (χ2=8.228, p-value=0.042), sex (males) (χ2=8.925, p-value= 0.003), education (literate) (χ2= 9.226, p-value= 0.026), family planning knowledge (χ2= 5.069, pvalue=0.024) ...