We investigate the moral hazard problem in which a principal delegates multiple tasks to multiple workers. The principal imperfectly monitors their action choices by observing the public signals that are correlated with each other through a macro shock. He divides the workers into two groups and makes them compete with each other. We show that when the number of tasks is sufficiently large, rel...

The evolution of VLSI chips towards larger die size, smaller feature size and faster clock speed makes the clock distribution an increasingly important issue. In this paper, we propose a new clock distribution network (CDN), namely Variant X-Tree, based on the idea of X-Architecture proposed recently for efficient wiring within VLSI chips. The Variant X-Tree CDN keeps the nice properties of equ...

In this paper we propose a framework for measuring the overall performance of an automatic speaker recognition system using a set of trials of a heterogeneous evaluation such as NIST SRE2008, which combines several acoustic conditions in one evaluation. We do this by weighting trials of different conditions according to their relative proportion, and we derive expressions for the basic speaker ...

Network performance measurement tools, mainly used for TCP performance evaluations, have serious problems that their applications are limited to single point-to-point con guration and only the mean throughput for long term are measurable. Their major drawback is that they covers only a subset of the entire TCP functions and small variations of network systems. In this paper, we propose a TCP pe...

As multimedia applications over the Internet proliferate, the efficient transport of both the signaling and multimedia data becomes increasingly important. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP), the two most widely used but limited transport protocols, are not well suited to contemporary multimedia applications involving digital voice, audio and video communicatio...

We conduct a laboratory experiment with agents working on and principals benefiting from a real effort task in which the agents’ performance can only be evaluated subjectively. Principals give subjective performance feedback to agents and agents have an opportunity to sanction principals. In contrast to existing models of reciprocity we find that agents tend to sanction whenever the feedback of...

IEEE 802.11p is the new standard for intervehicular communications (IVC) using the 5.9 GHz frequency band; it is planned to be widely deployed to enable cooperative systems. 802.11p uses and performance have been studied theoretically and in simulations over the past years. Unfortunately, many of these results have not been confirmed by on-tracks experimentation. In this paper, we describe fiel...

The 007 benchmark provides a comprehensive test of OODB (Object-Oriented Data Base) performance. In this paper, we discuss the problems and the possible suggestions for the 007 Benchmark, based on our experience, in terms of performance evaluation of OODB concurrency control techniques. Our discussions are focused on three access types of OODB concurrency control techniques: conflict among meth...

Transport Layer protocols supporting multipath transfer, i.e. to simultaneously utilise multiple Network Layer paths, are actively discussed in the IETF – particularly in the context of Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) and Concurrent Multipath Transfer for SCTP (CMT-SCTP). Congestion control for such protocols is an important research topic. In this code contribution paper, we introduce our application m...

Preface This report was originally prepared as a part of the compulsory organised training programme in my doctoral studies in environmental management. The report was the outcome of a subject called 'Biodiversity indicators and environmental performance evaluations' which was organised as an individually adapted list of set literature (DI-LSF01). After the evaluation and due to fruitful discus...