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Sufficient Incentive (sufficient + incentive)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	50%

Selected Abstracts

Incentive-based scheduling in Grid computing

CONCURRENCY AND COMPUTATION: PRACTICE & EXPERIENCE, Issue 14 2006
Yanmin Zhu
Abstract With the rapid development of high-speed wide-area networks and powerful yet low-cost computational resources, Grid computing has emerged as an attractive computing paradigm. In typical Grid environments, there are two distinct parties, resource consumers and resource providers. Enabling an effective interaction between the two parties (i.e. scheduling jobs of consumers across the resources of providers) is particularly challenging due to the distributed ownership of Grid resources. In this paper, we propose an incentive-based peer-to-peer (P2P) scheduling for Grid computing, with the goal of building a practical and robust computational economy. The goal is realized by building a computational market supporting fair and healthy competition among consumers and providers. Each participant in the market competes actively and behaves independently for its own benefit. A market is said to be healthy if every player in the market gets sufficient incentive for joining the market. To build the healthy computational market, we propose the P2P scheduling infrastructure, which takes the advantages of P2P networks to efficiently support the scheduling. The proposed incentive-based algorithms are designed for consumers and providers, respectively, to ensure every participant gets sufficient incentive. Simulation results show that our approach is successful in building a healthy and scalable computational economy. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

TRIGGER-POINT MECHANISM AND CONDITIONAL COMMITMENT: IMPLICATIONS FOR ENTRY, COLLUSION, AND WELFARE

CONTEMPORARY ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 2 2007
LARRY D. QIU
When fixed, sunk investment costs are high, firms may not have sufficient incentive to enter the market unless future entry is constrained. In this case, the government faces a dilemma between a full commitment and noncommitment of restricted future entry. A way out is to consider a commitment conditional on the realization of the uncertain parameters, such as the trigger-point mechanism (TPM) that sets conditions on current production level, excess capacity, and demand growth under which future entry will be allowed. This article shows that the TPM facilitates the incumbents' collusion but may improve social welfare under certain circumstances. (JEL L13, L43, L50, H10, H54) [source]

Are There Economic Incentives for Non-Traditional Students to Enter HE?

HIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2007
The Labour Market as a Barrier to Widening Participation
The expansion of higher education (HE) in the UK has disproportionately benefited young people from relatively rich families: the gap between rich and poor in terms of participation in HE having widened since the 1970s. We explore a neglected possible cause of this class difference: that the labour market fails to provide sufficient incentives for potential entrants from less advantaged backgrounds to enter HE. Most studies of the rewards from participating in HE in the UK suggest that the rates of returns are sufficiently high to provide clear economic incentives to participate. However, until recently, most studies generated estimates of the average rate of return to graduation, which could overestimate returns to marginal entrants, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. In this review we examine the methodological problems faced by more targeted studies of the rates of return to graduation and review their key findings concerning the economic returns to non-traditional entrants. [source]

The Revenge of Distance: Vulnerability Analysis of Critical Information Infrastructure

JOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2004
Sean P. Gorman
The events of 11 September 2001 brought an increased focus on security in the United States and specifically the protection of critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure encompasses a wide array of physical assets such as the electric power grid, telecommunications, oil and gas pipelines, transportation networks and computer data networks. This paper will focus on computer data networks and the spatial implications of their susceptibility to targeted attacks. Utilising a database of national data carriers, simulations will be run to determine the repercussions of targeted attacks and what the relative merits of different methods of identifying critical nodes are. This analysis will include comparison of current methods employed in vulnerability analysis with spatially constructed methods incorporating regional and distance variables. In addition to vulnerability analysis a method will be proposed to analyse the fusion of physical and logical networks, and will discuss what new avenues this approach reveals. The analysis concludes that spatial information networks are vulnerable to targeted attacks and algorithms based on distance metrics do a better job of identifying critical nodes than classic accessibility indexes. The results of the analysis are placed in the context of public policy posing the question do private infrastructure owners have sufficient incentives to remedy vulnerabilities in critical networks. [source]