We study the welfare effects of an increase in firms’ information about consumer naivete in a simple reduced-form model in which competitive firms can introduce distortionary fees that naive consumers ignore when making purchase decisions. We establish that our model captures many markets—including those for credit, banking, hotels, gambling, and mobile phones—in which consumer naivete has been...

One poorly investigated issue in organizational agility is the question how organizations change their speed while adopting and exploiting new IT capability. In this paper we outline a theory of software development agility that draws upon a model of IT innovations by Swanson and on March’s learning theory and in particular on his concepts of exploration and exploitation. We explore how both ex...

In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of performance feedback on the outcome of crowd-sourcing contests. We develop a dynamic structural model to capture the economic processes that drive contest participants' behavior, and estimate the model using a rich data set collected from a major online crowdsourcing design platform. The model captures key features of the crowdsourcing context...

Small and medium sized UAVs like German LUNA have long endurance and define in combination with sophisticated image exploitation algorithms a very cost efficient platform for surveillance. At Fraunhofer IOSB, we have developed the video exploitation system ABUL with the target to meet the demands of small and medium sized UAVs. Several image exploitation algorithms such as multi-resolution, sup...

General models of the evolution of cooperation, altruism and other social behaviours have focused almost entirely on single traits, whereas it is clear that social traits commonly interact. We develop a general kin-selection framework for the evolution of social behaviours in multiple dimensions. We show that whenever there are interactions among social traits new behaviours can emerge that are...

Many large and small decisions we make in our daily lives-which ice cream to choose, what research projects to pursue, which partner to marry-require an exploration of alternatives before committing to and exploiting the benefits of a particular choice. Furthermore, many decisions require re-evaluation, and further exploration of alternatives, in the face of changing needs or circumstances. Tha...

The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the central trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the exploration phase involves costly experiments and occurs before the exploitation phase; and where each play of an arm durin...

The exploitation of data locality in parallel computers is paramount to reduce the memory traac and communication among processing nodes. We focus on the exploitation of locality by Parallel Radix sort. The original Parallel Radix sort has several communication steps in which one sorting key may have to visit several processing nodes. In response to this, we propose a reorganization of Radix so...