Forecasting, cost management and pricing policies are topics which have beenwidely investigated over time. Due to a lack of scientific research about therelationships between each of those subjects, these methods have beeninvestigated in combination with their outcomes. The purpose of this work was todevelop a framework which can be used by managers who want to make adecision in either of the subjects mentioned before. By the use of a qualitative, interpretive research design, a literature review was performed which led to some interesting findings. Generally, it can be said that the methods are not related directly, although the outcomes are linked and can often be used as a criterion for the decision making process for the other methods.

The development of future smart electricity grids is driven by efficiency and climate targets and economic benefit for producers, retailers and customers on the deregulated electricity market. Since most investments will be made by grid owners acting as regulated monopolies, it is unclear how they will get return on their investments. Can demand response programs create cost reductions for the grid owner that help motivate the investment in smart grids? Two cases of cost reduction opportunities are evaluated assuming that peak loads are reduced by a demand response program: optimization of cable dimensions for lower peak loads when building new grids, and avoided investments in reinforced capacity in the existing grid. Potential cost reductions are estimated for the two example cases, using financial and technical data for Fortum's local distribution grid in Stockholm. The result shows that reducing the capacity in the cables by 70-80 % only brings down investment costs by 3-4 %, since the common expense for excavation outweighs the incremental cost of cables. Over-capacity means increased redundancy and flexibility to increase load in the future, which are valuable features for a grid owner.Regarding investments in the existing grid, a substation that needs replacement because of overload is analyzed. Assuming a continued trend of steadily increasing load, a 34 % peak load reduction would delay the investment 20 years, which is in turn worth 900,000 SEK in 2010 prices.

New possibilities are developing in the infrastructure of electrical systems to meet the new demand of more volatile power generation. This study focuses on German household reactions to price changes and their economic and renewable utilization effects.   In order to model the effects of flexible prices in the Freiamt region, the basic research – including interviews and data collecting – is carried out in the fields of economics and renewable energy. An elasticity model based on the Spees and Lave study in used to simulate consumer behaviour to changing prices.   Two pricing structures with daily and hourly changing prices are found to lower the average electrical prices in both cases. These benefits are larger overall with the hourly price changes when all other variables are kept constant. This study finds that the changes to load patterns also seem to correlate with the local renewable energy production. Results suggest that this specific form of energy generation benefits from consumer reactions to changing prices during 2007 and 2008.   In order to validate these results the model should be expanded to include a more differentiated load from different sectors and to include a wider range of the electrical prices advertised to the consumer. However, under given circumstances, this study concludes that using more renewable power generation is possible both generally with daily price changes and also more specifically with hourly changing prices at a more competitive market price.

We study the effect of strategic consumer behavior on pricing, inventory decisions, and inventory release policies of a monopoly retailer selling a single product over two periods facing uncertain demand. We consider the following three-stage two-period dynamic pricing game. In the first stage the retailer sets his inventory level and inventory release policy; in the second stage the retailer faces uncertain demand that consists of both myopic and strategic consumers. The former type of consumers purchase the good if their valuations exceed the posted price, while the latter type of consumers consider future realizations of prices, and hence their future surplus, before deciding when to purchase the good; in the third stage, the retailer releases its remaining inventory according to the release policy chosen in the first stage. Game theory is employed to model strategic decisions in this setting. Each of the strategies available to the players in this setting (the consumers and the retailer) are solved backward to yield the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, which allows us to derive the equilibrium pricing policies. This work provides three primary contributions to the fields of dynamic pricing and revenue management. First, if, in the third stage, inventory is released to clear the market, then the presence of strategic consumers may be beneficial for the retailer. Second, we find the optimal inventory release strategy when retailers have capacity limitation. Lastly, we numerically demonstrate the retailer's optimal decisions of both inventory level and the inventory release strategy. We find that market clearance mechanism and intermediate supply strategy may emerge as the retailers optimal choice.

In recent years, energy harvesting has been generating great interests among researchers, scientists and engineers alike. One of the major reasons for this increased interest sterns from the desire to have autonomous perpetual power supplies for remote monitoring sensor nodes utilizing some of the already available and otherwise wasted energy in the environment in a very innovative and useful way (and at the same time, maintaining a green environment). Scientists and engineers are constantly looking for ways of obtaining continuous and uninterrupted data from several points of interests especially remote or dangerous locations, using sensors coupled with RF transceivers, without the need of ever replacing or recharging the batteries that power these devices. This is now made possible through energy harvesting technologies which serve as suitable power supply substitutes, in many cases, for low power devices. With the proliferation of wireless energy in the environment through different radio frequency bands as well as natural sources like solar, wind and heat energy, it has become a desirable thing to take advantage of their availability by harvesting and converting them to useful electrical energy forms. The energy so harnessed or harvested could then be utilized in sensor nodes. Now, since these energy sources fluctuate from time to time, and from place to place, there is the need to have a form of energy accumulation, conversion, conditioning and storage. The stored energy would then be reconverted and used by the sensors nodes and/or RF transceivers when needed. The process through which this is done is referred to as energy management. In this research work, many types of energy harvesting transducers were explored including – solar, thermal, electromagnetic and piezo/vibration. A proof of concept approach for an on-demand electromagnetic power generator is then presented towards the end. While most, if not all, of the energy harvesting techniques discussed needed some time to accumulate enough charge to operate their respective systems, the on-demand energy harvester makes energy available as at and when needed. In summary, a system level design is presented with suggested future research works.

This thesis is an extension of a recent study into the relationship between merger size and profitability. It studies a class of Cournot oligopoly with linear cost and quadratic demand. Its focus is to analyze how a mergers profitability is affected by its size and by the demand elasticity. Such results have not yet been reported in previous studies, perhaps due to the complexity of the equilibrium equation involved. It shows an increase in the demand elasticity also raises a mergers profitability. Consequently, an increase in the demand elasticity reduces merged members critical combined per-merger market share for the merger to be profit enhancing. Comparing with 80% minimum market share requirement for a profitable merger in Salant, Switzer, and Reynolds (1983), a greater market share is needed when the demand function is concave (demand is relatively inelastic), while a smaller market share may still be profitable when the demand function is convex (demand is relatively elastic). In our model, mergers are generally detrimental to public interests by increasing market price and reducing output. However, the merger will be less harmful when the goods are very inelastic.

<p>In recent years, with the fast development of resource capability of both the Internet and personal computers, multimedia applications like video-on-demand (VOD) streaming have gained dramatic growth and been shown to be potential killer applications in the current and next-generation Internet. Scalable deployment of these applications has become a hot problem area due to the potentially high server and network bandwidth required in these systems.</p><p>The conventional approach in a VOD streaming system dedicates a media stream for each client request, which is not scalable in a wide-area delivery system serving potentially very large numbers of clients. Recently, various efficient delivery techniques have been proposed to improve the scalability of VOD delivery systems. One approach is to use a scalable delivery protocol based on multicast, such as periodic broadcast or stream merging. These protocols have been mostly developed for single-server based systems and attempt to have each media stream serve as many clients as possible, so as to minimize the required server and network bandwidth. However, the performance improvements possible with techniques that deliver all streams from a single server are limited, especially regarding the required network bandwidth. Another approach is based on proxy caching and content replication, such as in content delivery networks (CDN). Although this approach is able to effectively distribute load across multiple CDN servers, the cost of this approach may be high.</p><p>With the focus on further improving the system efficiency regarding the server and network bandwidth requirement, a new scalable streaming protocol is developed in this work. It adapts a previously proposed technique called hierarchical multicast stream merging (HMSM) to use a peer-to-peer delivery approach. To be more efficient in media delivery, the conventional early merging policy associated with HMSM is extended to be compatible with the peer-to-peer environment, and various peer selection policies are designed for initiation of media streams. The impact of limited peer resource capability is also studied in this work. In the performance study, a number of simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the new protocol and various design policies, and promising results are reported.

A rapid urbanization process facilitated an enormous expansion of the cities and stimulated the development of the urban housing markets in China. The primary purpose of this thesis is to find factors influencing the urban housing prices. Based on the supply and demand theory, I examine housing prices in 95 cities in 2010 related to population growth, wages, manufacturing employment, human capital, pollution, and housing investment using a cross section data analysis. The empirical results indicate that all those factors are significantly related to the housing prices. I focus on population growth, a proxy for the urbanization process, as the core determinant to analyze housing prices in China. In addition, the results also find that cities located in the eastern area have averagely a higher productivity than the ones located in the mid-west, and the higher housing prices in the eastern area are explained by the higher level of population growth and wages.

Commercialization of sport has been growing since 80s and club owners tend to pay more and more attention not just to cups and titles but to commercial success as well. Nevertheless, fans are still the key source of revenues. Besides direct spending while attending games popular clubs and crowded stadiums grab attention of generous advertisers. That is why the problem of sports attendance becomes more and more important though ice hockey attendance is still not the most popular topic among sports marketing researchers. The majority of them cover Canada and the United States while European leagues suffer from the lack of studies as much bigger attention is paid to sport number one – soccer. In the same time, Sweden is one of the few countries in the world where ice hockey might be as popular as soccer. Swedish ice hockey league is one of the strongest in the world but still many clubs fail to sell out their arenas at every game. So the main purpose of this research is to identify factors that influence attendance of ice hockey games in Sweden and reveal their impact on attendance. The analysis is conducted using quantitative methods, where econometrical and statistical approaches are primary tools. In order to test factors influencing attendance a multiple regression model was set up. The dataset was compiled using secondary data and consisted of 1317 regular season ice hockey matches played during 4 seasons (from 2008/2009 to 2011/2012) of the top Swedish ice hockey league called Elitserien. The main sources for compiling the dataset were game reports provided by Swedish Ice Hockey Association and Elitserien. The present study has shown that several factors have strongly positive effect on attendance. Scheduling (games on Friday, Saturday and during Christmas holidays) and rivalry are the most important factors that bring crowds to arenas. Moreover, it can be concluded that higher prices do not affect attendance negatively and clubs can slightly increase ticket prices to improve match day revenues. Finally, on-ice violence attracts Swedish fans while opposite trend exists in North America.

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