Incentive mechanism design for citizen reporting application using Stackelberg game

<p>The growing utilization of smartphones equipped with various sensors to collect and analyze information around us highlights a paradigm called mobile crowdsensing. To motivate citizens’ participation in crowdsensing and compensate them for their resources, it is necessary to incentivize the participants for their sensing service. There are several studies that used the Stackelberg game to model the incentive mechanism, however, those studies did not include a budget constraint for limited budget case. Another challenge is to optimize crowdsourcer (government) profit in conducting crowdsensing under the limited budget then allocates the budget to several regional working units that are responsible for the specific city problems. We propose an incentive mechanism for mobile crowdsensing based on several identified incentive parameters using the Stackelberg game model and applied the MOOP (multi-objective optimization problem) to the incentive model in which the participant reputation is taken into account. The evaluation of the proposed incentive model is performed through simulations. The simulation indicated that the result appropriately corresponds to the theoretical properties of the model.</p>

TEORI KEPUASAN KONSUMEN

Perilaku konsumen dalam memaksimumkan kepuasannya menggunakan bantuan analisis grafis, dengan menggunakan kurva indiferensi. Kurva indiferensi ialah suatu kurva yang menjelaskan tingkat kepuasan konsumen atas mengkonsumsi dua jenis produk barang, dimana semakin puas seseorang maka semakin tinggi pula kurva indiferensinya. Namun kepuasan seseorang memiliki batasan, yaitu dalam ekonomi konvensional batasannya adalah pendapatan yang dimilikinya, dalam ilmu ekonomi batasan pendapatan ini dikenal sebagai garis anggaran (budget constraint).

Professional and ethical dilemmas of economists (In memoriam János Kornai, 1928–2021)

János Kornai, the most distinguished Hungarian economist passed away on 18 October 2021. This short essay, written by a long-time disciple of Kornai tries to prioritize his scientific achievements spreading over six decades. The conclusion is that Kornai's most important contribution to the principles of economics was already presented in his 1971 book, entitled Anti-equilibrium, and without this book his most respected later works and his other original concepts, like the soft budget constraint or the shortage economy, cannot be understood.

Tension in New Zealand's Public Hospitals: Performance Effects of Sharpening Incentives

<p>New Zealand's health sector reforms in the mid-1990s introduced corporate institutions and market disciplines to public hospitals. Yet the reorganisation of New Zealand's public hospitals into Crown Health Enterprises (CHEs) led to severe criticisms. Ultimately the CHEs were replaced with non-profit Hospital and Health Services. This thesis focuses on three major criticisms of the CHEs. We use game theory to provide a formal and novel analysis of interactions that could cause an organisation's performance to differ markedly from the reformers' expectations. The analysis explains how a stylised set of reforms could fail to achieve their objectives. Chapter 2 analyses public hospital throughput data over the reform period. We find that the CHE reforms were independently associated with an increase in hospitals' treatment costs. This chapter motivates the theoretical analyses of the three criticisms of the CHEs. We structure the theoretic analysis using an organisational hierarchy with four actors: a funder, an (hospital) administrator, a (medical) specialist and a (health) consumer. The first criticism was that CHE Boards paid bonuses despite managers failing to achieve performance targets. Chapter 3 examines when a funder may want to revise the budget of an organisation and to pay the administrator a bonus despite failing to meet a target. We introduce three features of the CHE reforms that conventional soft budget constraint models partly or entirely neglect: funder bargaining power, revisable targets and performance bonuses. A flexible budget constraint paired with bonuses can be efficient in the light of uncertainty. The second criticism was that costs escalated despite strong managerial incentives for cost control. Chapter 4 argues that such incentives could disrupt trust in an organisation. We show that sharpening the administrator's incentives for cost control can create a misalignment between the administrator and the specialist and cause costs to escalate. Our result, that incentivising a measurable dimension of performance can worsen performance of that same task, contrasts with the conventional game-theoretic literature. The third criticism was that the reforms let doctors manipulate managers, resulting in inefficiency. The first model of Chapter 5 shows that an administrator might want to encourage a specialist to influence public opinion. We modify the first model to reflect a feature of the reforms: managerial efforts aimed at improving the organisation's operation. The administrator can damage a whistle-blower's credibility, to the detriment of specialists and patients. Both models give original insights into how the reforms could let an administrator take advantage of his role. In this multi-layered model, the administrator may intentionally reduce communication. The CHE reformers expected performance incentives to flow through a corporate structure to improve efficiency. Rather than a cascade of beneficial incentives, incomplete contracts could cause unintentional negative interactions. Tension and perverse incentives could have caused costs to rise, necessitating budget revisions and additional bonus payments, while permitting administrators to silence whistle-blowers. This research shows how complex organisations that rely on soft information can benefit from systems that enhance trust and collaboration, and may be harmed by unhealthy tension.</p>

Tension in New Zealand's Public Hospitals: Performance Effects of Sharpening Incentives

<p>New Zealand's health sector reforms in the mid-1990s introduced corporate institutions and market disciplines to public hospitals. Yet the reorganisation of New Zealand's public hospitals into Crown Health Enterprises (CHEs) led to severe criticisms. Ultimately the CHEs were replaced with non-profit Hospital and Health Services. This thesis focuses on three major criticisms of the CHEs. We use game theory to provide a formal and novel analysis of interactions that could cause an organisation's performance to differ markedly from the reformers' expectations. The analysis explains how a stylised set of reforms could fail to achieve their objectives. Chapter 2 analyses public hospital throughput data over the reform period. We find that the CHE reforms were independently associated with an increase in hospitals' treatment costs. This chapter motivates the theoretical analyses of the three criticisms of the CHEs. We structure the theoretic analysis using an organisational hierarchy with four actors: a funder, an (hospital) administrator, a (medical) specialist and a (health) consumer. The first criticism was that CHE Boards paid bonuses despite managers failing to achieve performance targets. Chapter 3 examines when a funder may want to revise the budget of an organisation and to pay the administrator a bonus despite failing to meet a target. We introduce three features of the CHE reforms that conventional soft budget constraint models partly or entirely neglect: funder bargaining power, revisable targets and performance bonuses. A flexible budget constraint paired with bonuses can be efficient in the light of uncertainty. The second criticism was that costs escalated despite strong managerial incentives for cost control. Chapter 4 argues that such incentives could disrupt trust in an organisation. We show that sharpening the administrator's incentives for cost control can create a misalignment between the administrator and the specialist and cause costs to escalate. Our result, that incentivising a measurable dimension of performance can worsen performance of that same task, contrasts with the conventional game-theoretic literature. The third criticism was that the reforms let doctors manipulate managers, resulting in inefficiency. The first model of Chapter 5 shows that an administrator might want to encourage a specialist to influence public opinion. We modify the first model to reflect a feature of the reforms: managerial efforts aimed at improving the organisation's operation. The administrator can damage a whistle-blower's credibility, to the detriment of specialists and patients. Both models give original insights into how the reforms could let an administrator take advantage of his role. In this multi-layered model, the administrator may intentionally reduce communication. The CHE reformers expected performance incentives to flow through a corporate structure to improve efficiency. Rather than a cascade of beneficial incentives, incomplete contracts could cause unintentional negative interactions. Tension and perverse incentives could have caused costs to rise, necessitating budget revisions and additional bonus payments, while permitting administrators to silence whistle-blowers. This research shows how complex organisations that rely on soft information can benefit from systems that enhance trust and collaboration, and may be harmed by unhealthy tension.</p>

ALTERNATIVE NUMERAIRES FOR MEASURING WELFARE CHANGES: REVIEW OF EMPIRICAL ENVIRONMENTAL VALUATION STUDIES

This study examines numeraire or an account unit that measures household welfare changes. Although money metric usually determines budget constraint, textbook explanations of the alternative metrics are limited. Therefore, the study aimed to fill the existing gap by systematically and qualitatively analysing previously published articles on environmental valuation in developing countries. The results showed the existence of alternative numeraires in working time, commodities, and financing. The alternative metrics are useful in the valuation of environmental goods and services in developing countries, especially those involving poor respondents and underdeveloped monetary transactions. The nonmonetary payments reduce zero bids due to the inability of subsistence people to pay in cash and help the poor express their true environmental values.

Utility Maximization of Bangladeshi Consumers within Their Budget: A Mathematical Procedure

A consumer is considered as a person or a group of people who uses purchased goods, products, or services only for personal use, and not for manufacturing or resale. Consumers usually purchase valuable and useful commodities or goods by spending all or partial of their income. The property of a commodity that enables it to satisfy human wants is called utility. Producers must be conscious to increase the utility among the consumers. This study has considered the maximization of utility problem of consumers of Bangladesh subject to two constraints; namely, budget constraint and coupon constraint. Consequently, in the study two Lagrange multipliers are used and interpreted these with mathematical analysis. Prediction of consumer behavior will help both producers and consumers to take decision of their future economic productions and consumptions, respectively. This article is ornamented with sufficient theorems and economic analyses. So that all the readers find interest when go through the economic analysis of utility maximization.