Bridge is among the zero-sum games for which artificial intelligence has not yet outperformed expert human players. The main difficulty lies in the bidding phase of bridge, which requires cooperative decision making under partial information. Existing artificial intelligence systems for bridge bidding rely on and are thus restricted by human-designed bidding systems or features. In this work, w...

In many countries, the installation and operation of concentrated solar power plants has been promoted with high feed-in tariffs and other incentives. However, as this technology is becoming more mature and the installation costs are being reduced, the incentives are minimized or totally abolished. Under these new economic conditions, there is an increased need for operation planning and power ...

We consider two mechanisms to procure differentiated goods: a request for quote and an English auction with bidding credits. In the request for quote, each seller submits a price and the inherent quality of his good. Then the buyer selects the seller who offers the greatest difference in quality and price. In the English auction with bidding credits, the buyer assigns a bidding credit to each s...

Demand response has gained significant attention in recent years as it demonstrates potentials to enhance the power system’s operational flexibility in a cost-effective way. Industrial loads such as aluminum smelters, steel manufacturers, cement plants, and air separation units demonstrate advantages in supporting power system operation through demand response programs, because of their intensi...

Competitive bidding is the main mechanism for allocation of construction projects and consequently price determination of the construction services in the A/E/C industry. While different aspects of construction bidding have been studied in the literature, there is still a need for developing a comprehensive model that captures the complex dynamics of bidding environment by considering interacti...

Individualized services are common in distributed computing systems: Consumers demand custom solutions and service providers tailor their offering. In negotiating a service contract, providers and consumers frequently fail in identifying the optimal combination of non-functional properties and price. A key reason is that negotiators simultaneously try to create and claim value leading to strate...

The potential for the cannibalization of new product sales by remanufactured versions of the same product is a central issue in the continuing development of closed-loop supply chains. We investigate the cannibalization question via auctions of new and remanufactured consumer and commercial goods. These auctions allow us to explore the impact of offering new and remanufactured products at the s...

Private health plans that enroll Medicare beneficiaries--known as Medicare Advantage (MA) plans--are being paid $11 billion more in 2009 than it would cost to cover these beneficiaries in regular fee-for-service Medicare. To generate Medicare savings for offsetting the costs of health reform, the Obama Administration has proposed eliminating these extra payments to private insurers and institut...

In this paper, we give a ‘direct’ construction of the endomorphism ring of supersingular elliptic curves over a prime field Fp from ‘ideal classes’ of Q( √−p). We use the result to prove that the result of Kaneko on ‘minimal’ CM liftings of such supersingular elliptic curves is a best possible result. We also prove that the result of Elkies on ‘minimal’ CM liftings of all supersingular elliptic...