Information goods such as books, journals, computer software, music and videos can be copied, shared, resold, or rented. When such opportunities for sharing are present, the content producer will generally sell a smaller amount at a higher price which may increase or decrease pro¢ts. I identify three circumstances where pro¢ts increase: (1) when the transactions cost of sharing is less than the...

THE JUNE 2012 ISSUE OF CONSUMER REPORTS includes a cover story entitled “5 Medical Tests You Don’t Need.” The story reflects a joint Choosing Wisely initiative by Consumer Reports and the American Board of Internal Medicine aimed at “encouraging physicians, patients and other health care stakeholders to think and talk about medical tests and procedures that may be unnecessary, and in some insta...

Clustering is an important tool for data mining, since it can identify major patterns or trends without any supervision (labeled data). Over the past five years, semi-supervised (constrained) clustering methods have become very popular. These methods began with incorporating pairwise constraints and have developed into more general methods that can learn appropriate distance metrics. However, s...

The objective of cooperative game theory is to study ways to enforce and sustain cooperation among agents willing to cooperate. A central question in this field is how the benefits (or costs) of a joint effort can be divided among participants, taking into account individual and group incentives, as well as various fairness properties. In this chapter, we define basic concepts and review some o...

We reveal a connection between coordination mechanisms for unrelated machine scheduling and cost-sharing protocols. Using this connection, we interpret three coordination mechanisms from the recent literature as Shapley-value-based cost-sharing protocols, thus providing a unifying justification regarding why these mechanisms induce potential games. More importantly, this connection provides a t...