Contributions in Merlin

We prove that any strictly competitive perfect-information two-person game with n outcomes is solvable in n−1 steps of elimination of weakly dominated strategies— regardless of the length of the game tree. The given bound is shown to be tight using a variant of Rosenthal's centipede game.

The present work focuses on the choice of the elicitation technique within a contingent valuation (CV) framework. We simultaneously apply three different elicitation techniques to elicit willingness-to-pay (WTP) values for three programs against Alzheimer's disease. First, the dichotomous choice approach is used, which is the standard procedure. However, giving respondents only a yes/no response alternative seems to result in overestimated WTP values. Therefore, we secondly apply the dissonance-minimizing format which screens respondents for their preferences and thus avoids possible yea-saying and protest answers against the payment vehicle. The third format, a modified version of the payment card, allows respondents to express a level of voting certainty and to make less of a commitment. With our findings we show that a well-designed CV method is a suitable instrument for helping decision makers in the health care sector and that the Swiss population favors highly a program which improves the situation of informal caregivers.

This paper addresses the question under which circumstances unemployment can be lower if unions bargain over wages and employment in a general equilibrium framework. Thereby, it turns out that the unemployment rate may negatively depend on the wage rate, if the unemployment compensation scheme contains a constant real term in addition to the replacement ratio component. This is, compared with a pure replacement ratio scheme, the more plausible formalization of the real world’s compensation systems, at least for European countries. Besides the theoretical analysis, the paper also derives political implications by identifying the relevant parameters for the decision on whether weakening unions will be a good strategy for an economy to overcome its unemployment problem.

One of the problems faced by large, global organizations and enterprises is to effectively enable their employees to collaborate across locations. People need collaborative work support while they are on the move and have to share business documents and know-how. Although much work has been done in the area of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) to date, supporting mobility is only recently receiving attention. Hence, most of the existing approaches do not deal with emerging mobile teamwork requirements such as locating business documents and expertise through distributed searches, advanced subscription and notification, community building, and mobile information sharing and access. Furthermore, existing applications and approaches are usually difficult to customize to business-specific processes and requirements. The MObile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organizations Networking (MOTION)1 system addresses these requirements and provides a generic teamwork services Application Programming Interface (API), TWSAPI, that can be used to build organization-specific collaborative applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the MOTION TWSAPI and illustrate its usage in building an application that provides document review support.

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Large, global enterprises are increasingly faced with the problem of supporting employees that are on the move. Employees need to share business documents, locate expertise and knowledge through distributed searches, access effective subscription/notification mechanisms, and they need any time, anywhere access to the company’s information resources. We address these problems and requirements in theMObile Teamwork Infrastructure for OrganizationsNetworking (MOTION) project and aim to create an advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure for mobile teamwork. This short paper gives a brief description of the MOTION peer-to-peer platform for mobile teamwork.

Program comprehension is crucial for software maintenance activities and is supported by reverse engineering techniques. Many of them analyze source code and use parsers to create higher-level representations of software systems that are more meaningful to engineers. But the application of parsers is for some reasons not always desirable. In this paper, we introduce Revealer a lightweight source model extraction tool that combines advantages of lexical analysis with syntactical analysis. It uses an easyto- use pattern language that supports engineers in defining pattern definitions of diverse granularity depending on the problem at hand. In this way our tool enables fast extraction of simple and complex code patterns that allow engineers a quick insight into particular architectural aspects that are expressed via source code patterns.

Die Verfügbarkeit von Parsern mit einem hohen Abdeckungsgrad weckt das Bedürfnis nach systematischer und breiter Evaluation der Leistungsfähigkeit dieser Programme. Um linguistisch interpretierbare Masse zu erhalten, schlagen wir eine selektive Methode vor, die relevante Analysemerkmale aus dem Parsebaum projiziert, misst und robusten Resultaten so ein robustes Messverfahren beistellt. Dies erlaubt mit vertretbarem Aufwand zwei Parser fürs Deutsche gegenüber einem syntaktisch annotierten Korpus zu evaluieren, obwohl alle drei Komponenten auf unterschiedlichen Grammatikmodellen beruhen.

In this paper, we present the Adora approach to object-oriented modeling of software (Adora stands for analysis and description of requirements and architecture). The main features of Adora that distinguish it from other approaches like UML are the use of abstract objects (instead of classes) as the basis of the model, a systematic hierarchical decomposition of the modeled system and the integration of all aspects of the system in one coherent model. The paper introduces the concepts of Adora and the rationale behind them, gives an overview of the language, sketches a novel concept for visualizing the model hierarchy with a tool and reports the results of a validation experiment for the Adora language.