How does a bank's involvement interplay with a firm's capacity investment? An analysis and comparison of different consortium structures

As nonrecourse project finance (rather than financing on a sovereign basis) is becoming more prevalent worldwide, financing institutions have to collaborate more closely with firms to optimize capacity‐investment and financing decisions. Under this background, this paper presents a stylized Stackelberg games model, taking into account the firm's capacity investment as well as the bank's interest rate and funding ratio decisions. Consortium structures between bank and firm are formalized into five modes based on industry practice, namely, the integrated consortium, pure shareholder funding, bank as leader, full coordination, and bank as follower. The optimality and equilibrium of each of the five modes are analytically derived, and their existence and uniqueness are demonstrated. Valuable economic insights are obtained through both modeling analysis and numerical experiments, with the main findings including the following: (i) a lack of bank financing leads to insufficient capacity investment and poor consortium performance; (ii) interest rate and funding ratio play important but different roles in the bank's risk management; (iii) the bank's proactivity in leading and coordinating the consortium is critical for the two parties’ overall performance; and (iv) if the bank is the follower, the firm's capacity decision is irrelevant to the bank's loan contract, and the consortium cannot be coordinated to the first‐best level of performance.     

论游戏的核心艺术评价标准

数字游戏常被认为是继文学、绘画、音乐等传统艺术之后的“第九艺术”。然而,长期以来,由于游戏的评价标准被商业体系左右,造成了游戏创作在思想层面的偏颇,所以设计师有必要建立一套针对数字游戏的艺术评价标准,以促进游戏的艺术创作和理论研究。从艺术思潮、艺术哲学和设计创新的角度出发,通过美学历史文献查阅、游戏艺术作品案例分析、艺术理论辨析等方法,就游戏的核心艺术因素展开论述。游戏的艺术标准应包括情感表现、艺术反思和创新性三个主要方面。其中,艺术情感是所有艺术的共性和核心;艺术反思是艺术理念的升华和艺术创作的动机;创新性则是艺术更替发展的内在动力。该标准独立于商业体系,将有助于促进和引导数字游戏在艺术层面的发展。     

The role of Persian-language word exercise games in improving spelling of students with dyslexia: Word exercise games in improving spelling

Children with dyslexia have reduced sensitivity to phonological sounds and words, and this deficiency in lexical processing causes many problems for them. Word exercise games based on phonological awareness have emphasized the mistakes of students with dyslexia, attempting to help children avoid these mistakes. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of Persian-language word exercise games on the spelling of students with dyslexia. The design of the present study was quasi-experimental, with a pretest and posttest of an experimental group and a control group. Participants were 30 students with dyslexia from second grade to fifth grade in elementary schools in Bojnord, who completed the spelling test as a pretest and posttest. The experimental group played eleven 40-min sessions of word exercise games. The results showed that the word exercise programme improved the spelling of the children with dyslexia. This suggests that basing training on the phonological mistakes of students with dyslexia and using the word exercise games can improve their spelling.     

Spillover effects of distribution grid tariffs in the internal electricity market: An argument for harmonization?

In many countries, distribution grid tariffs are being reformed to adapt to the new realities of an electricity system with distributed energy resources. In Europe, legislative proposals have been made to harmonize these reforms across country borders. Many stakeholders have argued that distribution tariffs are a local affair, while the European institutions argued that there can be spillovers to other countries, which could justify a more harmonized approach. In this paper, we quantify these spillovers in a simplified numerical example to give insight and an order of magnitude. We look at different scenarios, and find that the spillovers can be both negative and positive. To be able to quantify these effects, we developed a long-run market equilibrium model that captures the wholesale market effects of distribution grid tariffs. The problem is formulated as a non-cooperative game involving consumers, generating companies and distribution system operators in a stylized electricity market.     

Coverage control algorithm for wireless sensor networks based on non-cooperative game

For the redundancy coverage of nodes leads to the phenomenon of low energy efficiency,Non-cooperative game theory was used to solve it.A revenue function was proposed,which considering the coverage of nodes and the residual energy.The lifetime of the node and network path gain were applied to revenue function.The network topology was built by nodes with the appropriate work strategy.Control algorithm coverage in wireless sensor network was proposed based on Non-cooperative game theory.A Nash equilibrium between the coverage rate and the residual energy was proved,and the return function converged to the Pareto optimal.Experiments show that the algorithm can provide reasonable coverage of network nodes and ensure energy efficiency.     

售电市场环境下售电公司与电力用户双层博弈模型研究

售电市场放开是我国售电侧改革的发展方向,竞争性售电市场中用户选择权放开,用户选择结果影响售电公司的售电策略,售电公司售电策略又会直接影响用户选择。构建售电公司与电力用户间双层博弈模型,下层模型为用户层演化博弈,上层模型为售电公司间非合作博弈。首先分析影响用户选择售电公司的因素,建立用户效用模型,采用演化博弈理论构建不同类型用户群体选择售电公司的多群体动态演化模型。在构建用户选择模型的基础上,分析售电公司的购售电策略,计及售电公司面临的风险因素,建立售电公司和电力用户的双层博弈模型并给出了博弈均衡的求解算法。算例分析结果表明,所构建的模型和算法具有可行性和有效性。     

基于博弈分析的流域水资源配置

针对传统规划方法难以体现水资源配置过程中多种复杂因素的问题,基于博弈理论建立宏观调控和市场经济相结合的水资源配置动态博弈模型,求解其子博弈精炼纳什均衡下各博弈参与人的策略,并运用改进量子遗传算法求解该博弈模型。对A河流域水资源配置结果表明,在保证流域公共生态用水2.0×10~8 m~3的基础上,各用水子区自发约束自身的取水量,达到均衡时,社会总收益为11.27亿元,相比自由取水模型,社会总收益增加了0.95亿元,增幅为9.2%。     

Two‐sided matching framework for optimal user association in 5G multi‐RAT UDNs

Recently, academic and industrial research communities are paying more explicit attention to the 5G multiple radio access technology ultra‐dense networks (5G multi‐RAT UDNs) for boosting network capacity, especially in UD urban zones. To this aim, in this paper, we intend to tackle the user association problem in 5G multi‐RAT UDNs. By considering the decoupled uplink/downlink access (DUDA), we divide our user association problem into two distinct subproblems representing, respectively, the uplink and the downlink channels. Next, we formulated each one as a nonlinear optimization problem with binary variables. Then, to solve them, we were restricted by the hard complexity, as well as the hard feasibility of centralized user association schemes. Thus, to resolve our user association problem in a reasonable time and distributed manner, we formulated each subproblem as a many‐to‐one matching game based on matching theory. Next, we provide two fully distributed association algorithms to compute the uplink and downlink stable matching among user equipments (UEs) and base stations (BSs). Simulation results corroborate our theoretical model and show the effectiveness and improvement of our achieved results in terms of the overall network performance, quality of service (QoS), and energy efficiency (EE) of UEs.     

Relating video game exposure,sensation seeking,aggression and socioeconomic factors to school performance

ABSTRACT

The time displacement hypothesis has been widely used to explain the effects of media use on academic performance. This approach has been criticised for its monocausality and weak explanatory power. Utilising a combination of different theoretical perspectives is better suited than utilising only one. Considering displacement, excitement, attraction and third variable hypothesis, this paper argues that the relation between video game use and school performance is not the same for all types of gamers by considering the influence of socioeconomic, psychological and contextual factors. It investigates how gaming patterns (frequency, time of day) and psychological characteristics (sensation seeking, aggression) are related to academic performance for primary and secondary school students. Five hundred and seven students from five primary and four secondary schools in Singapore participated in a paper-pencil survey. Results showed support for a combination of displacement and third variable hypothesis, as overall time spent on video games was negatively associated with primary school children’s and active gamers’ school performances. There was no significant relationship for secondary school children. For primary school children who play games in the morning and afternoon, video game use was negatively associated with school performance. There was no support for the attraction and excitement hypotheses.     

A resilient buffer allocation scheme in active queue management: a stochastic cooperative game theoretic approach

During the last decade, a plentiful number of active queue management schemes have been proposed, but their main objectives are simply allocating the buffer resource to all flows evenly, or protecting responsive flows from being degraded by unresponsive flows. However, the sending rates of the responsive flows can be determined diversely, and not all unresponsive flows have aggressively high sending rates. Furthermore, it is rational to reserve a portion of the buffer resource for certain privileged traffic. Grounded by these evidences, in this paper, we present a resilient active queue management algorithm, named Prior‐Core‐based Buffer Allocation considering diverse congestion control algorithms, fair‐unresponsive flows, and some privileged traffic. Our approach is based on stochastic cooperative game theory, where the payoffs yielded by cooperation are described by random variables, and the core is defined only over the distribution of these random payoffs; the core in this situation is called the prior‐core. As a result, it is shown that our buffer allocation, yielded by the prior‐core, achieves completely fair allocation for those flows whose requirement does not exceed the fair‐share regardless of the responsiveness, whereas aggressive flows are restricted according to availability of the buffer; all these are verified through ns‐2 simulation experiments. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.