The field of economic mechanism design has been an active area of research in economics for at least 20 years. This field uses the tools of economics and game theory to design “rules of interaction” for economic transactions that will, in principle, yield some desired outcome. In this paper I provide an overview of this subject for an audience interested in applications to electronic commerce a...

Traditional traffic management techniques employed by Internet Service Providers (ISP) cannot successfully deal with the increasingly high volumes of overlay traffic and lead both overlay and underlay to sub-optimal behavior. Individual optimizations as performed on each different layer result in low Quality-of-Experience (QoE) for the overlay users and, therefore, limited business opportunitie...

A new approach to choosing the optimum design of reciprocating compressors is discussed. Economic criteria ore included together with optimisation procedures which account far thermodynamic criteria of performance, These procedures are applied to a mathematical model of a compressor to produce a "best" design. Such factors as initial cost, interest rates, depreciation, inflation, running costs,...

Finalement, je tiensà remercier ma famille et mes amis pour leur soutien et, tout simple-ment, pour leur présencè a mes côtés en toutes circonstances.

1. AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Economics began with Xenophon=s AOeconomicus@ (c 360 BCE), in which Socrates interviews a model citizen who has two primary concerns. He goes out to his farm in the country to monitor and motivate his workers there. Then he goes back to the city, where his participation in various political institutions is essential for maintaining his rights to own this farm. Such ...

Economic design has seen the emergence of a number of attractive randomized rules for allocation, matching, and even voting. In this essay, I would like to raise three fundamental questions in the context of randomization in economic design, which I think have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. I will take the perspective of social choice theory and refer to randomized collectiv...

Enhancing e-commerce security through computing technology alone is not sufficient. E-commerce designers should apply economic mechanisms to design proper digital processes that accommodate new perspectives raised in e-commerce. For instance, traditional auction mechanisms, such as the Generalized Vickrey Auction, are vulnerable to false-name bidding, an online fraud exploiting the lack of auth...

Evidence is growing that sustainable buildings provide financial rewards for building owners, operators, and occupants. Sustainable buildings typically have lower annual costs for energy, water, maintenance/repair, churn (reconfiguring space because of changing needs), and other operating expenses. These reduced costs do not have to come at the expense of higher first costs. Through integrated ...