The application of this work is to decision taking with financial time-series, using learning algorithms. The traditional approach is to train a model using a prediction criterion, such as minimizing the squared error between predictions and actual values of a dependent variable, or maximizing...

In this paper, we look at how labor market conditions at different points during the tenure of individuals with firms are correlated with current earnings. Using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel on individuals for the period 1984 to 1994, we find that both the contemporaneous...

We analyze the contract-based relationship between a local community and a private operator in charge of a water utility. An important feature of the regulation model is the existence of water network losses that may reduce the operator's cost. We derive solutions to the optimal contract both...

Small and medium enterprises have strengthened their importance during the last decades in most industrialized countries, including the United States, Germany, Japan and Canada. The province of Quebec makes no exception as firms of less than 200 employees generate a substantial portion of its...

Agent and multiagent systems are nowadays a very active field of research although it has emerged in eighties. This field is in fact a very multidisciplinary field since it is sustained by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Distributed Systems, Software Engineering, etc. It focuses mainly on...

We study a longitudinal sample of over one million French workers and over 500,000 employing firms. Real total annual compensation per worker is decomposed into components related to observable characteristics, worker heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity and residual variation. Except for the...

While most e-commerce research focuses on one market based problems, less work has been done on multimarket aggregation. Nowadays it is important to address the multimarket package e-procurement problem if we want to acquire a combination of goods and services from different suppliers and...

The price of an option should reflect the average value that a buyer receives for it, and also a risk premium. This report describes an empirical study for analysing these factors as a graphical and quantitative manner. The analysis focuses on the average difference between the price option and...

Incorporating prior knowledge of a particular task into the architecture of a learning algorithm can greatly improve generalization performance. We study here a case where we know that the function to be learned is non-decreasing in its two arguments and convex in one of them. For this purpose...

Computer networks and distributed systems in general may be regarded as communities where the individual components, be they entire systems, application software or users, interact in a shared environment. Such communities dynamically evolve with components or nodes joning and leaving the...