Competition between network providers is believed to be a necessary condition for an efficient functioning Internet industry. It spurs technology innovation as network providers compete to provide better quality and enhanced services; improving consumers' welfare in the process. Given the impact...

This thesis addresses a problem at the nexus of engineering, computer science, and economics: in large scale, decentralized systems, how can we efficiently allocate scarce resources among competing interests? On one hand, constraints are imposed on the system designer by the inherent...

There is an increasing trend toward massive, geographically distributed systems. The largest Internet companies operate hundreds of thousands of servers in multiple geographic locations, and are growing at a fast clip. A single system's servers and data centers can consume many megawatts of...

This paper addresses two basic questions about the outbound distribution operations with a case study example of a large biopharmaceutical company. First, the research work focuses on developing an efficient, scalable truck distribution system to help reduce transportation cost, while...

This thesis deals with five important ideas pertaining to supply chains and supply contracts: coordination, flexibility in allocating profit, the push-pull boundary, the valuation of capacity, and cooperation versus competition and its effects on profit and prices. Throughout the thesis, we...

In this thesis we use nonlinear and linear estimation techniques to model two common investment strategies: hedge funds and technical analysis. Our models provide transparent and low-cost alternatives to these two nontransparent, and in some cases prohibitively costly, financial approaches. In...

Existing preference reasoning systems have been successful in simple domains. Broader success requires more natural and more expressive preference representations. This thesis develops a representation of logical preferences that combines numerical tradeoff ratios between partial outcome...

Risk arbitrage is one of the investment strategies commonly employed by hedge funds and financial investment firms. In essence, it constitutes a bet on whether a merger deal is consummated. Several academic studies have found that risk arbitrage trading strategies are able to generate...

The work documented in this thesis is part of the OpenTag project, which has the goal of designing and developing a flexible and more powerful RFID system to meet the needs of the approaching ubiquitous tagging of everyday items. The focus of this thesis is on methods to improve privacy control...

In many studies of market microstructure, theoretical analysis quickly becomes in tractable for all but the simplest stylized models. This thesis considers two alternative approaches, namely, the use of experiments with human subjects and simulations with intelligent agents, to address some of...