Contributions in Merlin

We explore the relationship between outcomes in a coordination game and a pre-play asset market where asset values are determined by outcomes in the subsequent coordination game. Across two experiments, we vary the payoffs from the market relative to the game, the degree of interdependence in the game, and whether traders' asset payoffs are dependent on outcomes in their own or another game. Markets lead to significantly lower efficiency across treatments, even when they produce no distortion of incentives in the game. Market prices forecast game outcomes. Our experiments shed light on how financial markets may influence affiliated economic outcomes.

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[Context and motivation] Most requirements engineering (RE) approaches involve analysts in gathering end-user needs. However, we promote the idea that future service-based applications should support end-users in expressing their needs themselves, while the system should be able to respond to these requests by combining existing services in a seamless way. [Question/problem] Research tackling this idea is limited. In this research preview paper we sketch a plan to investigate the following research questions: How can end-users be facilitated by a system to express new needs (e.g. goals, preferences)? How can the continuous analysis of end-user needs result in an appropriate solution? [Principal ideas/results] In our recent research, we have started to explore the idea of involving end-users in RE. Furthermore, we have proposed an architecture that allows performing RE at run-time. The purpose of the planned research is to combine and extend our recent work and to come up with a tool-based solution, which involves end-users in realizing self-adaptive services. Our research objectives include to continuously capture, communicate and analyze end-user needs and feedback in order to provide a tailored solution. [Contribution] In this paper we give a preview on the planned work. After reporting on our recent work we present our research idea and the research objectives in more detail.

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Event pattern matching is a query technique where a sequence of input events is matched against a complex pattern that specifies constraints on extent, order, values, and quantification of matching events. The increasing importance of such query techniques is underpinned by a significant amount of research work, the availability of commercial products, and by a recent proposal to extend SQL for event pattern matching. The proposed SQL extension includes an operator PERMUTE, which allows to express patterns that match any permutation of a set of events. No implementation of this operator is known to the authors.In this paper, we study the sequenced event set pattern matching problem, which is the problem of matching a sequence of input events against a complex pattern that specifies a sequence of sets of events rather than a sequence of single events. Similar to the PERMUTE operator, events that match with a set specified in the pattern can occur in any permutation, whereas events that match with different sets have to be strictly consecutive, following the order of the sets in the pattern specification. We formally define the problem of sequenced event set pattern matching, propose an automaton-based evaluation algorithm, and provide a detailed analysis of its runtime complexity. An empirical evaluation with real-world data shows that our algorithm outperforms a brute force approach that uses existing techniques to solve the sequenced event set pattern matching problem, and it validates the results from our complexity analysis.

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