19864603
Identifying Facilitators and Inhibitors of Market Structure Change: A Hybrid Theory of Unbiased Electronic Markets
The electronic markets hypothesis (EMH) in the information systems (IS) literature suggests that information technology (IT) will reduce coordination costs across firms, leading to market-based forms of economic activity. With the advent of the Internet, we have seen a move to unbiased electronic markets. However, in some industries electronic hierarchies or biased markets predominate, contrary to the predictions of the impacts of IT suggested by the EMH. We present a hybrid theory to explain how moves to unbiased markets are facilitated and accelerated by IT. This is based on electronic markets and hierarchies theory, and the theory of market design. We explore how different forces and situational factors can inhibit the move to advanced forms of market-based organization. Together, these theories offer valuable insights to understand which forces will predominate with respect to whether a vertical market will be transformed to a biased electronic market or an unbiased electronic market. We analyze mini-cases in the context of three business-to-business e-commerce settings: fixed income securities, the electric power industry, and corporate travel services. The industries we have selected exhibit different outcomes which illustrate the value of the new theory relative to predictions involving market structure transformations.
57631
Insights and analyses of online auctions
30721210
Economic analysis of consumer purchase intentions in electronic and traditional retail channels: competitive and strategic implications
We develop a multiattribute economic model to analyze consumer behavior for traditional and electronic channels based on consumers' risk profiles and risk-neutral or risk-averse. We then conduct comparative analyses of consumer purchase decisions to derive strategies for different channels. We study the attitudinal and economic factors that lead to specific purchase decisions under different combinations of price, delivery time, and product customization. We develop theoretical propositions concerning consumer channel switching behavior, incentives to consumers, and pricing strategies for different channels. We also use simulations to gain insights for cases where analytical model becomes intractable.
7914809
Predicting Bidders' Willingness to Pay in Online Multiunit Ascending Auctions: Analytical and Empirical Insights
We develop a real-time estimation approach to predict bidders' maximum willingness to pay in a multiunit ascending uniform-price and discriminatory-price (Yankee) online auction. Our two-stage approach begins with a bidder classification step, which is followed by an analytical prediction model. The classification model identifies bidders as either adopting a myopic best-response (MBR) bidding strategy or a non-MBR strategy. We then use a generalized bid-inversion function to estimate the willingness to pay for MBR bidders. We empirically validate our two-stage approach using data from two popular online auction sites. Our joint classification-and-prediction approach outperforms two other naive prediction strategies that draw random valuations between a bidder's current bid and the known market upper bound. Our prediction results indicate that, on average, our estimates are within 2% of bidders' revealed willingness to pay for Yankee and uniform-price multiunit auctions. We discuss how our results can facilitate mechanism-design changes such as dynamic-bid increments and dynamic buy-it-now prices.
17233820
IT-enabled transparent electronic markets: the case of the air travel industry
The electronic market hypothesis predicts that by reducing coordination costs, information technology (IT) will shift industrial organization from hierarchical to market-based forms of economic activity. While academic researchers and practitioners have witnessed these shifts with the advent of the Internet, there is little understanding about the process and the underlying forces that drive them. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the air travel industry, which has recently experienced significant IT-driven transformations. We conclude that, together with IT, pro-competitive laws and the information-intensive nature of air travel products have triggered competition for consumers with transparent market mechanisms, which is leading to the emergence of more transparent electronic markets in the air travel industry.
166893960
Priority pricing of integrated services networks
2504115
Database-guided segmentation of anatomical structures with complex appearance
The segmentation of anatomical structures has been traditionally formulated as a perceptual grouping task, and solved through clustering and variational approaches. However, such strategies require the a priori knowledge to be explicitly defined in the optimization criterion, e.g., "high-gradient border", "smoothness"', or "similar intensity or texture". This approach is limited by the validity of underlying assumptions and cannot capture complex structure appearance. This paper introduces database-guided segmentation as a new data-driven paradigm that directly exploits expert annotation of interest structures in large medical databases. Segmentation is formulated as a two-step learning problem. The first step is structure detection where we learn how to discriminate between the object of interest and background. The resulting classifier based on a boosted cascade of simple features also provides a global rigid transformation of the structure. The second step is shape inference where we use a sample-based representation of the joint distribution of appearance and shape annotations. To learn the association between the complex appearance and shape we propose a feature selection mechanism and the corresponding metric. We show that the selected features are better than using directly the appearance and illustrate the performance of the proposed method on a large set of ultrasound heart images.
18542805
IT infrastructure in emerging markets: arguing for an end-to-end perspective
To help sustain large-scale pervasive computing in emerging markets, researchers must address unique challenges in the delivery fabric and enterprise backbone. Such challenges present opportunities for high impact innovation. Although most research organizations have focused on developing consumer-facing solutions, we posit that future research must take an end-to-end perspective. That is, researchers must not only consider the front end (such as consumer devices) but also the medium to reach the consumer (for example, the delivery fabric) and the back end (for example, the enterprise backbone) to create an economically sustainable, scalable solution. Although our end-to-end perspective generalizes to all emerging markets, in this article, we mainly discuss the Indian market from which we based our observations.
9910171
Semantics and CBIR: a medical imaging perspective
Medical CBIR (content-based image retrieval) applications pose unique challenges but at the same time offer many new opportunities. On one hand, while one can easily understand news or sports videos, a medical image is often completely incomprehensible to untrained eyes. On the other hand, semantics in the medical domain is much better defined and there is a vast accumulation of formal knowledge representations that could be exploited to support semantic search for any specialty areas in medicine.
 In this paper, however, we will not dwell on any one particular specialty area, but rather address the question of how to support scalable semantic search across the whole of medical CBIR field: what are the advantages to take and gaps to fill, what are the key enabling technologies, and the critical success factor from an industrial point of view.
 In terms of enabling technologies, we discuss three aspects: 1. anatomical, disease, and contextual semantics, and their representations using ontologies; 2. scalable image analysis and tagging algorithms; and 3. ontological reasoning and its role in guiding and improving image analysis and retrieval.
 More specifically, for ontological representation of medical imaging semantics, we discuss the potential use of FMA, RadLex, ICD, and AIM. For scalable image analysis we present a learning-based anatomy detection and segmentation framework using distribution-free priors. It is easily adaptable to different anatomies and different imaging modalities.
32641793
Document Summarization using Wikipedia
Although most of the developing world is likely to first access the Internet through mobile phones, mobile devices are constrained by screen space, bandwidth and limited attention span. Single document summarization techniques have the potential to simplify information consumption on mobile phones by presenting only the most relevant information contained in the document. In this paper we present a language independent single-document summarization method. We map document sentences to semantic concepts in Wikipedia and select sentences for the summary based on the frequency of the mapped-to concepts. Our evaluation on English documents using the ROUGE package indicates our summarization method is competitive with the state of the art in single document summarization.
62972305
On the complexity of computation and learning in neural networks
This dissertation is on the complexity of computation and learning in Neural Networks. One of the reasons for studying neural networks is that they provide a computational model which seems closer to the computational framework employed by the human brain for information processing than the conventional computers. Neural networks are highly simplified model of the human brain and one hopes that by attaining a proper understanding of the computational aspects in neural networks, one can gain significant insights into the computational characteristics of the human brain. 
In this dissertation, we have considered three different kinds of neural networks, namely, the Boltzmann Machines, the Hopfield Nets and the Feedforward Neural Nets. We studied the computational and learning abilities of these networks from a complexity theory point of view. We also related the computational power of various neural nets, in particular, the Boltzmann Machines and the Feedforward Neural Nets which are also known as Threshold circuits in the complexity theory literature.