Online social networking systems are a phenomenon that has grown exponentially over the past few years. These systems provide platforms for people to easily share information, especially about themselves and about their interests. With the recent emergence of geolocation technologies, social...

With the emergence of the Internet as a global structure for communication and interaction,many “business to consumer” and “business to business” applications have migrated online,thus increasing the need for software agents that can act on behalf of people, institutions orcompanies with...

This thesis develops a generic framework based on the Fourier transform for pricing and hedging of various options in equity, commodity, currency, and insurance markets. The pricing problem can be reduced to solving a partial integro-differential equation (PIDE). The Fourier Space Time-stepping...

One desirable property of machine learning algorithms is the ability to balance the number of parameters in a model in accordance with the amount of available data.Incorporating nonparametric Bayesian priors into models is one approach of automatically adjusting model capacity to the amount of...

By facilitating mutually beneficial transactions, trust is a crucial ingredient for economic development. We explore the determinants of trust by studying a model in which agents rely on imperfectly enforceable contracts to support cooperation in a prisoners' dilemma production game. We show how...

By facilitating mutually beneficial transactions, trust is a crucial ingredient for economic development. We explore the determinants of trust by studying a model in which agents rely on imperfectly enforceable contracts to support cooperation in a prisoners’ dilemma production game. We show...