Title of dissertation: MECHANISM DESIGN WITH GENERAL UTILITIES Saeed Alaei, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Dissertation directed by: Professor Samir Khuller Department of COMPUTER SCIENCE This thesis studies mechanism design from an optimization perspective. Our main contribution is to characterize fundamental structural properties of optimization problems arising in mechanism design and to exploit...

SYNOPSIS Part I. Two approaches to utilitv theorly: happiness theory and preference theory.

Discrete choice models are usually derived from the assumption of random utility maximization. We consider the reverse problem, whether choice probabilities are consistent with maximization of random utilities. This leads to tests that consider the variation in these choice probabilities with the average utilities of the alternatives. By restricting the range of the average utilities we obtain ...

In regional and rural areas of NSW, drinking water is provided by 107 local water utilities serving a total population of some 1.7 million and operating 323 water supply systems. NSW Health exercises public health oversight of these regional water utilities through the NSW Health Drinking Water Monitoring Program, which provides guidance to water utilities on implementing elements of the Austra...

Q uality of life (QOL) is an important predictor of melanoma survival and thus important to understand. Utilities are a health economic measure of QOL eliciting patient preferences for a specific health state. Patients theoretically give up something of value (money, time, risk of death) to not have the disease in question, thus providing insight into the burden of disease. In an era of limited...

BACKGROUND Utilities and disability weights (DWs) are metrics used for calculating Quality-Adjusted Life Years and Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), respectively. Utilities can be obtained with multi-attribute instruments such as the EuroQol 5 dimensions questionnaire (EQ-5D). In 2010 and 2013, Salomon et al. proposed a set of DWs for 220 and 183 health states, respectively. The objective...