In the monopoly nonlinear pricing problem with unobservable consumer types, we study mechanisms in which the firm makes the set of consumer options conditional on the aggregate reports of consumer types it receives. Previous mechanisms that exploit knowledge of the true type distribution often have multiple equilibria or use noncredible contracts off the equilibrium path. When the monopolist ca...

Reputation and commitment are important issues for automated contracting. Levelled commitment contracts, i.e. contracts where each party can decommit by paying a predetermined penalty, were introduced to allow self interested agents to accommodate events that unfolded since the contract was entered into. Various approaches to modelling reputation have been explored, allowing an agent to make de...

What is the importance of specific control and contractual mechanisms for IT outsourcing relationship quality and outsourcing success? Employing a survey among financial institutions and applying Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) known from marketing research, we analyse the relative importance of Service Level Agreements, control and contractual mechanisms for relationship quality and outs...

Promises are social contracts that can be broken, kept, or exceeded. Breaking one’s promise is evaluated more negatively than keeping one’s promise. Does expending more effort to exceed a promise lead to equivalently more positive evaluations? Although linear in their outcomes, we expected an asymmetry in evaluations of broken, kept, and exceeded promises. Whereas breaking one’s promise is obvi...

A discrete event simulation model was developed to study the flow of material and product in a shop floor. It uses real time data available from a job shop sole dedicated to noncommercial contracts and as such deals with very seasonal demand. The objective of this model is to provide the shop with a decision support tool that will assist in evaluating the movement of products throughout the sho...

We describe two algorithms for finding representatives of the nilpotent orbits of a θ-group. The algorithms have been implemented in the computer algebra system GAP (inside the package SLA). We comment on their performance, and we apply the algorithms to obtain lists of N-regular automorphisms of simple Lie algebras of exceptional type.

One central goal of the AMITIÉS multilingual humancomputer dialogue project is to create a dialogue management system capable of engaging the user in human-like conversation in a specific domain. To that end, we have developed new methods for the manual annotation of spoken dialogue transcriptions from European financial call centers. We have modified the DAMSL dialogic schema to create a dialo...

We consider mechanism design problems with n agents when the mechanism designer cannot fully commit to an allocation function. With a single agent (n 5 1) optimal mechanisms can always be represented by direct mechanisms, under which each agent’s message set is the set of his possible types [Bester, H., Strausz, R., 2000. Contracting with imperfect commitment and the revelation principle: the s...

We report on the adequacy of using Sato processes to value equity structured products. In models used to price options on realized variance, the latter must be a random variable with a positive variance. An analysis of this variance of realized variance for Sato processes shows that these processes may be suited to option contracts on realized volatility. Nonlinear pricing principles based on h...