scholarly journals Cloud Pricing: The Spot Market Strikes Back

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludwig Dierks ◽  
Sven Seuken

Cloud computing providers must constantly hold many idle compute instances available (e.g., for maintenance or for users with long-term contracts). A natural idea, which should intuitively increase the provider’s profit, is to sell these idle instances on a secondary market, for example, via a preemptible spot market. However, this ignores possible “market cannibalization” effects that may occur in equilibrium as well as the additional costs the provider experiences due to preemptions. To study the viability of offering a spot market, we model the provider’s profit optimization problem by combining queuing theory and game theory to analyze the equilibria of the resulting queuing system. Our main result is an easy-to-check condition under which a provider can simultaneously achieve a profit increase and create a Pareto improvement for the users by offering a spot market (using idle resources) alongside a fixed-price market. Finally, we illustrate our results numerically to demonstrate the effects that the provider’s costs and her strategy have on her profit. This paper was accepted by Gabriel Weintraub, revenue management and market analytics.

Author(s):  
Nina M. Bachmann ◽  
Benedict Drasch ◽  
Gilbert Fridgen ◽  
Michael Miksch ◽  
Ferdinand Regner ◽  
...  

AbstractThe phenomenon of a blockchain use case called initial coin offering (ICO) is drawing increasing attention as a novel funding mechanism. ICO is a crowdfunding type that utilizes blockchain tokens to allow for truly peer-to-peer investments. Although more than $7bn has been raised globally via ICOs as at 2018, the concept and its implications are not yet entirely understood. The research lags behind in providing in-depth analyses of ICO designs and their long-term success. We address this research gap by developing an ICO taxonomy, applying a cluster analysis to identify prevailing ICO archetypes, and providing an outlook on the token value market performance for individual archetypes. We identify five ICO design archetypes and display their secondary market development from both a short-term and a long-term perspective. We contribute to an in-depth understanding of ICOs and their implications. Further, we offer practitioners tangible design and success indications for future ICOs.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (7) ◽  
pp. 601-608
Author(s):  
Mena I. Souliman ◽  
Ashish Tripathi ◽  
Lubinda F. Walubita ◽  
Mayzan M. Isied

Joint sealing in jointed plain concrete pavement (JPCP) has been practiced throughout the world for many years as it improves the performance of concrete pavements. The infiltration of water is a common problem in concrete pavements and often increases distresses, such as faulting and pumping. For this reason, sealing the joints can help reduce water infiltration. Additionally, the infiltration of sand and small stones, aggregates, or debris into the joints can also be prevented, consequently reducing joint spalling in concrete pavements. However, it is also reported that joint sealing increases the initial cost of construction, especially if the joints need to be resealed, which leads to some additional costs. In this study, the pavement distress data was collected from the long-term pavement performance (LTPP) database for all the JPCPs sections in North Texas. The study illustrates the relative field performance in terms of spalling, faulting, roughness, and deflections of JPCP sections for both sealed and unsealed LTPP sections of North Texas.


2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi Ren ◽  
Alparslan Emrah Bayrak ◽  
Panos Y. Papalambros

We compare the performance of human players against that of the efficient global optimization (EGO) algorithm for an NP-complete powertrain design and control problem. Specifically, we cast this optimization problem as an online competition and received 2391 game plays by 124 anonymous players during the first month from launch. We found that while only a small portion of human players can outperform the algorithm in the long term, players tend to formulate good heuristics early on that can be used to constrain the solution space. Such constraining of the search enhances algorithm efficiency, even for different game settings. These findings indicate that human-assisted computational searches are promising in solving comprehensible yet computationally hard optimal design and control problems, when human players can outperform the algorithm in a short term.


Omega ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 42-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinpeng Xu ◽  
Gengzhong Feng ◽  
Wei Jiang ◽  
Shouyang Wang
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Irina Šolaja

Investment in the economy is necessary and essential, and lack of personal funds are overcome by encouraging and attracting foreign investment. Business practice shows that all sophisticated investors and lenders insist on the so-called. pricing schemes, which are adaptable to changing circumstances during long-term contracts with successive or permanent fulfillment. Countries, where most of the international commercial lenders are located, consider that the Fixed Price Contract also includes the division of the business risk. However, per our law, a Fixed Price Contract is not also a redistribution of business risk, which means that in case of external events parties are required to fulfill their obligations. Why is this significant? If there are no contractual provisions, that regulate the contract adjustments related to the changed circumstances, then the used provisions are from the host country which legal terms are determined.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (284) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ehsan Ebrahimy

This paper studies a novel type of misallocation of credit between investments of varying liquidity. One type of investment is more liquid, i.e., its return is more pledgeable, and the other is more productive. Low liquidities of both investment types imply that the allocation of credit is constrained inefficient and that there is overinvestment in the liquid type. Constrained inefficient equilibria feature non-positive, i.e., one less than or equal the economy’s growth rate, and yet too high interest rate, too much investment and too little consumption. Financial development can reduce long-term welfare and output in a constrained inefficient equilibrium if it raises the liquidity of the liquid type. I show a maximum liquid asset ratio or a simple debt tax can achieve constrained efficiency. Introducing government bonds can make Pareto improvement whenever it does not raise the interest rate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 412
Author(s):  
Sindre Knutsson

Increasing spreads between spot liquefied natural gas (LNG) and oil-indexed contracts have resulted in the world’s top three LNG buyers paying a cost premium of $33 billion in 2019 and 23 billion in 2020. The top three buyers are Japan, China and South Korea, which had a combined 151Mt of long-term LNG contracts indexed to oil in 2020. This cost premium shows what top Asian buyers are currently paying for the security of LNG supply through long-term oil-indexed contracts. However, it also shows the potential reward Asian buyers have if they manage to develop a liquid LNG pricing hub in Asia to which they can index their contracts. Japanese buyers’ efforts of increasing flexibility in contracts, both through take-or-pay agreements and destination flexibility and aims of growing the spot market, will increasingly support the liquidity of the LNG market. However, there will be resistance from the other side of the table, for where someone is paying a premium, or making a loss, someone is making money. 2020 was another year of plenty for LNG producers selling oil-indexed volumes to Asian markets. Australia is the largest seller of LNG to Japan, China and South Korea with over 60Mt of long-term LNG contracts indexed to oil in 2020. Australia has benefited from having their contracts indexed to oil, but what’s next? In this paper, Rystad Energy will discuss the future market for Australian LNG exports including development in LNG demand, contract trends and price spreads.


2019 ◽  
pp. 125-134
Author(s):  
Punam Gupta ◽  
Dinesh Kumar

Marketplace ethical behaviour is quite difficult to practice because it stands at cross purposes with commercial objectives. Both companies and consumers look for short term benefits in preference over practices that are sustainable or planet friendly. The thinking that dominates development economics globally is to buy, use and throw. Companies like to launch new products all the time encouraging consumers to buy new and bigger models, packaged attractively, on which margins are higher, throwing away perfectly fine and working products. Ethical behaviour – whether it is sourcing of raw materials to paying workers adequately – entails additional costs and efforts. Modifying behaviour or inculcating long term thinking is not an easy task. This chapter looks at existing behaviour both of companies and consumers. It also describes ways in which business and government policy needs to change to encourage long-term thinking in society to change lifestyles across the board.


2018 ◽  
Vol 189 ◽  
pp. 10019
Author(s):  
Hao Li ◽  
Changzhu Wei

A trajectory optimization method for RLV based on artificial memory principles is proposed. Firstly the optimization problem is modelled in Euclidean space. Then in order to solve the complicated optimization problem of RLV in entry phase, Artificial-memory-principle optimization (AMPO) is introduced. AMPO is inspired by memory principles, in which a memory cell consists the whole information of an alternative solution. The information includes solution state and memory state. The former is an evolutional alternative solution, the latter indicates the state type of memory cell: temporary, short-and long-term. In the evolution of optimization, AMPO makes a various search (stimulus) to ensure adaptability, if the stimulus is good, memory state will turn temporary to short-term, even long-term, otherwise it not. Finally, simulation of different methods is carried out respectively. Results show that the method based on AMPO has better performance and high convergence speed when solving complicated optimization problems of RLV.


2019 ◽  
Vol 144 (04) ◽  
pp. 282-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dieter Köhler

AbstractSince 2005, invasive long-term ventilation in Germany has increased significantly from around 1000 to 20 000 patients in Germany. Due to complex home care, the health care system incurs additional costs of around 4 billion euros per year. In addition, in the last 2 – 3 years more tracheostomized patients have been discharged home without ventilation (usually after stroke), and they receive the same complex home care. These patients have almost never been given the chance of a professional weaning trial by a weaning center. They are discharged from hospitals directly into the care. As a result, the quality of care is significantly worse than traditional care with structured discharge management via a weaning center. The solutions are difficult to find due to the interface problems between inpatient and outpatient care and the different organizational structures with different delivery systems. Possible solutions are shown, but most of them require a change in the law.


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