Contributions in Merlin

We consider a setting in which two potential merger partners each possess private information pertaining both to the profitability of the merged entity and to stand-alone profits, and we investigate the extent to which this private information makes ex-post regret an unavoidable phenomenon in merger negotiations. To this end, we consider ex-post incentive compatible mechanisms, which use both players’ reports to determine whether or not a merger will take place and what each player will earn in each case. When the outside option of at least one player is known, the efficient merger decision can be implemented by such a mechanism under plausible budget-balance requirements. When neither outside option is known, we show that the potential for regret-free implementation is much more limited, unless the budget balance condition is relaxed to permit money-burning in the case of false reports.

Software development becomes expensive, when more than three similar products are developed independently, without exploiting the commonality among these products. Requirements Engineering and Software Product Line Engineering help to reduce this costs. An advanced requirements engineering language and tool is needed, which is capable of handling requirements for product lines. ADORA is a requirements engineering tool, which is developed at the University of Zurich, which is capable of modeling product lines. The problem is, that ADORA needs to enable requirement negotiation. This allows the modeler to derive products from the product line. Otherwise much manual, time-intensive work is needed and no real-time requirements negotiations can be performed on that model. The dynamic weaving of single variants allows a quick instantiation of possible application requirements from the product line. Before this thesis was worked out, ADORA could not weave dynamically, which are now handled in a dedicated decision table. Another difficulty is the resulting layout of the weaving. Layout must be human friendly and organized in a proper fashion to support usability of this approach in product derivation with dynamic weaving. For the solution of this problem, we present our approach in this master thesis. First we enable dynamic weaving of single aspects, by deciding on variability decision items in a decision table. Second we improve the layout by automatically providing human friendly graphical layout for the woven models. As a validation we demonstrate our new concepts with two requirements examples: One more detailed specification example and one real-world industrial requirements exemplar. The validation measures aesthetic graphical layout criteria such as less bendings in the edges, less crossing of the edges, smaller difference among node size, avoidance of empty space and mental map preservance.

Staying competitive in the travel business means offering more services to the customers than just face-to-face travel consultation and booking. Based on an extensive requirement analysis this paper develops a product, which offers an added value to the customers by giving them access to a variety of information, digital travel documents and consultation while on the road. This product strongly improves the flexibility of traveling by enabling the customer to book during his journey. This way the traveler can use his or her well known contact in the travel agency to adjust travel plans anytime and anywhere. The results of the evaluation clearly show that such a service is a need and the presented implementation is easy to use and practical.s

We experimentally demonstrate how "unpacking" provides a possible approach for mitigating the dilemma of public goods provision through private contributions. Subjects' total contributions increase when a single public good is split into two identical public goods.

null

Traditional approaches to multipath routing ignore the economic incentives necessary in aligning both networks and users towards a common goal. While theory suggests congestion pricing can be used to maximize social welfare, even within such a framework we have no consistent method for evaluating, constructing and disseminating paths. Our research focuses on building on existing congestion pricing models to provide scalable and differentiated edge selectable routes. By redesigning traffic management to not only provide paths, but also price them accordingly, the resulting cost-aware multipath architecture could alleviate the tension between different stakeholders by evolving the Internet towards a fully functional market.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems achieve scalability, fault tolerance, and load balancing with a low-cost infrastructure, characteristics from which collaboration systems, such as Wikipedia, can benefit. A major challenge in P2P collaboration systems is to maintain article quality after each modification in the presence of malicious peers. A way of achieving this goal is to allow modifications to take effect only if a majority of previous editors approve the changes through voting. The absence of a central authority makes voting a challenge in P2P systems. This paper proposes the fully decentralized voting mechanism PeerVote, which enables users to vote on modifications in articles in a P2P collaboration system. Simulations and experiments show the scalability and robustness of PeerVote, even in the presence of malicious peers.

null

In this demonstration we present the Perm provenance management system (PMS). Perm is capable of computing, storing and querying provenance information for the relational data model. Provenance is computed by using query rewriting techniques to annotate tuples with provenance information. Thus, provenance data and provenance computations are represented as relational data and queries and, hence, can be queried, stored and optimized using standard relational database techniques. This demo shows the complete Perm system and lets attendants examine in detail the process of query rewriting and provenance retrieval in Perm, the most complete data provenance system available today. For example, Perm supports lazy and eager provenance computation, external provenance and various contribution semantics.