The Importance of Information Targeting for School Choice
Although school choice programs are common, we know little about the underlying decision-making processes. In this study, we randomly assigned 900 junior high schools in Ghana, a country with universal secondary school choice, to 1 of 3 treatment arms: (1) information to students, (2) information to students and guardians, and (3) control group. We observe changes in beliefs, behaviors, and the decision maker's identity through a survey of guardians. Our intervention increased the likelihood that guardians were involved with and informed about the school selection process. Moreover, specifically targeting guardians led to significantly larger changes for most outcomes.
Cloud federation offers new business models to enforce more flexible energy management strategies. Independent Cloud providers are exclusively bounded to the specific energy supplier powering its Data Centers. The situation radically change if we consider a federation of cooperating Cloud providers. In such a context a proper migration of virtual machines among providers can lead to global energy sustainability and cost-saving strategy. In this paper, we discuss a decision system for Cloud federation brokerage able to combine these two strategies. More specifically, we present Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) algorithm able to discover the most convenient Cloud providers candidate to join a particular energy-aware federation. In the end, modelling different possible real Cloud providers, we demonstrate how the algorithm can accommodate different Cloud federation scenarios characterized by particular energy-aware parameters.