We discuss the polarized proton-positron scattering in the context of the excess of high-Q 2 events at HERA. We define and estimate a polarized asymmetry to examine the two scenarios, the contact interaction and stop scenario without R-parity. This asymmetry shows a characteristic behavior depending on the scenarios. Thus the polarized experiment at HERA will provide with a good test for these ...

The paper concentrates on four aspects of mitigating market power in European electricity networks: capacity divestiture, entry, promoting interconnection, and the capacity to regulate competition in generation, drawing on lessons from Britain, California and the Continent. Each of these actions can improve the intensity of competition in electricity wholesale markets, but attractive strategies...

Without monetary payments, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem proves that under mild requirements all truthful social choice mechanisms must be dictatorships. When payments are allowed, the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism truthfully implements the value-maximizing choices, assuming agents’ utilities are quasi-linear in money. We study social choice with payments where utilities are non-quasi-lin...

Congestion games—in which players strategically choose from a set of “resources” and derive utilities that depend on the congestion on each resource— are important in a wide range of applications. However, to date, such games have been constrained to use utility functions that are linear sums with respect to resources. To remove this restriction, this paper provides a significant generalisation...

In this paper we propose to model a negotiator’s decision-making behavior, expressed as preferences between an offer/counter-offer gamble and a certain offer, by learning from implicit choices that can be inferred from observed negotiation actions. The agent’s actions in a negotiation sequence provide information about his preferences and risk-taking behavior. We show how offers and counter-off...

Utilities are numeric measurements that reflect an individual's beliefs about the desirableness of a health condition, willingness to take risks to gain health benefits, and preferences for time. This report discusses the approaches to assess and compare the validity of methods used to assign utilities for cost-utility analysis. Threats to validity include construct underrepresentation and cons...

Benchmarking is one of several regulatory tools to encourage continuous improvement of water utility operations and to evaluate utility performance. Regulators of water utilities can use benchmarking, in conjunction with incentive regulation, to reward efficient utilities that provide high quality service. However, benchmarking requires careful planning. This article, the fourth in a series abo...

This note considers a property, called “limited shared weak preferences” (LSWP), in the context of a model with linear utility functions defined on a polyhedron of alternatives. As special cases, we capture the distributive politics model with externalities in consumption, and we capture collective choice of lotteries by expected utility-maximizing agents. We give a simple sufficient condition ...

The paradigm of Interoperability Service Utility (ISU) is considered as one of the grand challenges in research of Enterprise Interoperability. In this paper, we discuss on the relevance and impact of the current ISU research to the semantic interoperability in general and propose an original architecture for implementation of the Semantic Interoperability Service Utilities (S-ISU). The propose...

This report on restructuring public utilities draws on both submissions prepared by the countries themselves and from a large body of work by the OECD on regulatory reform – including the sectoral reviews carried out by the Competition Committee, the publications of the OECD’s Regulatory Reform Project, the work of the OECD’s TISP Committee in telecommunications, work by the International Energ...