Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the most flexible form of cloud computing and provides great opportunities to acquire and release computing resources as necessary. However, consumers face an increasingly opaque market due to growing number of providers and tariff options. As an approach to aid consumers finding the right tariff matching their needs, we suggest a broker model as an intermediate b...

Abstract: The highly competitive communications markets of the future should encompass mechanisms for enabling users to find and associate with the most appropriate retailers, i.e., those offering at a certain time period, adequate quality services in a cost efficient manner. This paper presents such mechanisms. Our starting point is the definition of a business case, through which the role of ...

In the future, electronic exchanges will be a major facilitator of negotiation systems and a driver for new forms of bargaining and matchmaking between potential trading partners. Most existing bargaining systems are based on formalized auction schemes which need a centralized authority (an auctioneer). With the development of decentralized networks, we need new forms of electronic bargaining w...

During the past four decades, public trust in governments has continued to diminish due to various administrative, political, socio-cultural, economic, and mass media causes. Focusing on the administrative dimension, this study explores selected administrative factors to the declining of public trust, including public perception of administrative corruption (lack of transparency), inefficiency ...

The efficient and economic allocation of resources is one main goal in the field of production planning and control. Nowadays, a new variable gains in importance throughout the planning process: Energy. Energy-efficiency has already been widely discussed in literature, but with a strong focus on reducing the overall amount of energy used in production. This paper provides a brief systematic app...

Analyzing Cost Efficient Production Behavior Under Economies of Scope: A Nonparametric Methodology In designing a production model for firms that generate multiple outputs, we take as a starting point that such multi-output production refers to economies of scope, which in turn originate from joint input use and input externalities. We provide a nonparametric characterization of cost efficient ...

Disasters are large intractable problems that test the ability of communities and nations to effectively protect their populations and infrastructure, to reduce both human and property loss, and to rapidly recover. The seeming randomness of impacts and problems and uniqueness of incidents demand dynamic, real-time, effective and cost efficient solutions, thus making the topic very suitable for ...

Considering heuristic search for satisficing and cost-optimal planning, we introduce the notion of global safeness of a heuristic, a property weaker than the standard safeness, which we claim is better for heuristic search. We describe one concrete approach for creating globally safe and optimality preserving heuristics by exploiting information in the history of the search via a new form of in...

We compare the welfare effects of different regulation schemes of electricity distribution utilities. The compared regulation schemes are fixed price regulation, cost of service regulation, menu of cost-contingent contracts and simple menus of contracts. In our calculations we utilize the information of firm specific potential to improve cost efficiency. The firm specific cost information of Fi...