Open Sourcing as a Profit-Maximizing Strategy for Downstream Firms

Value and information: A profit maximizing strategy for Maxwell's demon

Applications of Lagrange's method of undetermined multipliers in physics and economics suggest some analogies between the two disciplines. By using the work of E. T. Jaynes on information theory, the long standing problem of Maxwell's demon in thermodynamics can be cast as a constrained optimization problem where information and energy are dual concepts. Temperature emerges as the energetic pri...

Unproductive Labor as Profit Rate Maximizing Labor

Profit-maximizing pricing for tollbooths

The input to the tollbooth problem is a graph G = (V,E) and a set of m buyers Pi where each buyer is interested in buying a path Pi connecting si, ti ∈ V . Each buyer comes with a budget b(Pi), a positive real number. The problem is to set non-negative prices to the edges E of G. A buyer buys her path Pi if the sum of prices on Pi is at most her budget. If a buyer buys her path, we obtain a pro...

Quality competition with profit constraints: Do non-profit firms provide higher quality than for-profit firms?

In many markets, such as education, health care and public utilities, firms are often profit-constrained either due to regulation or because they have non-profit status. At the same time such firms might have altruistic concerns towards consumers. In this paper we study semi-altruistic firms’ incentives to invest in quality and cost-reducing effort when facing constraints on the distribution of...

A Profit-Maximizing Strategy of Network Resource Management for 5G Tenant Slices

Supported by the emerging technologies of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and network slicing, 5G networks allow tenants to rent resources from mobile network operators (MNOs) in order to provide services without possessing an own network infrastructure. The MNOs are therefore facing the problem of deciding if to accept or decline the resource renting requests they receive. This paper bui...