Contributions in Merlin

Markets for energy-using durables seem to be characterized by an “energy efficiency gap”, the phenomenon that consumers could save on total costs if they bought high-efficiency products but often decide not to do so. This fact has been attributed to consumers undervaluing future cost savings relative to the upfront purchase price, possibly due to their high discount rates. Factors influencing discounting behavior include the following: 1. Individuals’ rates of pure time preference, i.e. the rate at which future utility is ex- changeable for present utility 2. Uncertainty concerning product life, service reliability and future energy costs 3. Individuals’ limited access to capital markets resulting in liquidity constraints 4. Difficulties obtaining and processing information regarding future running costs The objective of the current research was to develop a descriptive model of discounting be- havior which disentangles the effects of pure time preferences from other potentially decisive factors in the context of financial decision making and to test the model with novel experi- mental data. The data was collected from a representative sample of the German speaking Swiss population. We elicited discount rates, measures of risk aversion and other individual data relevant for decisions on energy-using durables. There were two different treatment groups: One group of the participants responded to hypothetical questions and received a flat participation fee, the other group was paid depending on their decisions in an incentive compatible manner. The following results emerged: 1. We found a substantial incentive effect: People who responded to hypothetical ques- tions exhibited an average discount rate of 47.5% p.a., compared to 36.4% p.a. of the incentivized group. Model estimates show that there is no significant difference between groups’ preference parameters other than their levels of pure time preference. The incentive effect can be traced back to the behaviors of comparatively small subgroups of people in the hypothetical treatment who reacted strongly to two factors: skepticism about the certainty of future payments and liquidity constraints, both of which drove up discount rates considerably. We did not find any evidence whatsoever that participants in the hypothetical treatment did not do their best to respond conscientiously and honestly. We conjecture that the incentive effect is due to people’s inherent difficulty of foreseeing how they will behave when they actually face real consequences of their choices. For this reason we recommend that the design of policy measures should be principally based on the analysis of real decisions. 2. Liquidity constraints are an important factor affecting people’s behavior in the incentivized treatment group. We estimate that discount rates are 40% higher for liquidity-constrained individuals than for unconstrained ones who exhibit an average rate of time preference of more than 30% p.a. The magnitudes of these rates suggest that there are considerable obstacles to investment in energy-efficient durables even for people with unlimited access to capital markets. 3. Participants reported to be concerned about uncertain future energy costs and to have difficulties with assessing monthly energy costs. Both factors may play a crucial role in people’s undervaluation of future energy cost savings. Product- and consumer-specific information on present values of expected running costs may help consumers in their decision making. 4. If our estimates of time preference rates are indeed manifestations of people’s innate preferences, information and education will most likely not alter people’s behavior. In this case, policy could influence relative prices of high-efficiency and low-efficiency durables directly via feebates, a combination of fees and rebates. This idea can be transferred to other aspects of the purchase decision, such as service, warranty and leasing contracts. In order to be able to quantify the relative magnitudes of fees and rebates, the extent of undervaluation of future costs will have to be assessed on a market-by-market basis.

A large body of empirical evidence documents that people systematically violate the key axioms of the standard economic theories of choice over time and choice under risk. In response to the evidence, new models have been developed, incorporating hyperbolic time preferences or nonlinear probability weights. These models constitute pronounced departures from standard theory, and, as a consequence, are associated with several practical issues. They often fail at predicting more than one important empirical regularity and, hence, are not able to provide a unifying explanation for anomalous behavior in intertemporal and risky choice. Motivated by these deficiencies, this thesis shows that environmental factors, such as liquidity constraints or inherent uncertainty, can bridge the gap between standard economic theory and effectively observed behavior. Anomalously-looking behavior may not necessarily be caused by exotic preferences, but can naturally arise from decision makers' rational responses to their environments. The predictions made by this approach dovetail nicely with existing empirical findings. Experimental data further support the theory's main conjectures and illustrate that it indeed has significant explanatory power. The results presented have important implications for the design of proper policy interventions and the state of standard economic theory in general.

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This theses shows different aspects how information can be organized at a scientific conference by using micro-blogging. It researches the observed behavior of conference participants and the results of the organizational measures that can be taken in order to support the discussion about the content of the conference. This new knowledge is gathered from existing theories, statistical observations and discussion with experts in the field.

This thesis analyses travellers' information search behaviour. The comparison of internet booking and travel agency booking is looked at closer. For this purpose, a questionnaire could be filled out on the websites of two different travel businesses. The data were analysed with a statistics program called SPSS. The results reveal a multitude of relations. An important relation is the difference in information search behaviour of internet and travel agency bookers. Future research should examine information search behaviour in conjunction with other variables.

Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon that changes the way organizations use the Internet to collect ideas, solve complex cognitive problems, and build high-quality data and knowledge repositories (e.g. Wikipedia) or even software (e.g., Linux) by self-organizing agents around data and knowledge. Many recent studies have highlighted the factors and the small sets of parameters that play a role when a large crowd interacts with an organization. However, no comprehensive simulation has yet been developed to incorporate all these parameters and potentially generate predictive power. This thesis, based on a multi-agent system, describes the development of a simulator named “CrowdSim”, for human crowds performing collective problem solving in a Crowdsourcing scenario. The simulator allows running sensitivity analyses of multiple parameters as well as simulating intractable interactions of complex networks of irrational agents. In addition, the modular and extensible way the simulator is built enables the user to increase the accuracy and predictive power when scientists gain new empirical insights.

This thesis develops the up-to-date summary, an automatic approach to aggregate histories of nutrient measurements in the Swiss Feed Database. Since measurements are taken irregularly and are sparse in the time, a simple aggregation over the entire history is not representative of the real world state. We fight this challenge by detecting trends in history of measurements with a set of data fitting functions: uniform fitting function, linear regression and kernel regression. The experimental evaluation proves the scalability of our approach to aggregate the measurements of good and bad quality data. Further, this thesis contributes to the development of the Feed Database with the integration of the up-to-date summaries into web application and with the import of the raw temporal data.

Word Sense Disambiguation is an interesting problem in the field of Natural Language Processing. This bachelor thesis presents a graph-based implementation of a word sense disambiguation algorithm. Besides this, it would like to show that this algorithm combined with a part-of-speechtagger would get better results. Unfortunately, the presented algorithm could not reach the baseline set by others work. In the last section, possible reasons are discussed. However, a slight but positive difference could have been shown in the algorithm using a part-of-speech-tagger.

Everyday manipulation of object involves a complex tactile sense system that is able to acquire rich information about objects and influence grasp control. Prosthetic hand wearers, that lost their tactile sense associated to the missing hand, are deprived of this information, thus encountering difficulties in efficiently manipulating objects in their daily activity. The restoration of the lost tactile sense for amputees wearing a prosthetic hand poses various challenges related to the design of interfaces that allow an efficient and rich flow of information between the environment and the prosthetic hand, and between the prosthetic hand and the user. Thus, main endeavors in haptic interfaces focus on developing tactile sensors or haptic devices in order to relay environmental information. The focus of this thesis is to inquire on stable and efficient grasp during object manipulation. To this aim, in this thesis we took the following investigation courses: 1. We developed an artificial ridged skin and tested its potential to extract enriched information (force, slippage detection, slippage speed) from the interaction with a slipping object using one force sensor. The approach aims to offer high information bandwidth to cost ratio, as well as to reduce the complexity (energy, weight) of prosthetic hands. The evaluation of the artificial ridged skin was performed under theoretical and practical conditions. 2. We investigated tactile parameters (force, slippage speed, force and slippage speed) that can lead to optimal grasp during object slippage. The evaluation was performed in a psychophysical experiment with human participants in a combined real and virtual environment. The results show that the artificial ridged skin is a promising tactile sensor for extracting information related to slippage. Furthermore, the results suggest that force and slippage speed feedback may enable an optimal reaction time and grip for overcoming slippage. The study supports a better understanding of the requirements for stable grasp with prostheses. Additionally, the performance of the artificial ridged skin comes to propose the means of reaching a stable grasp.

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