預測市場的研究近年來在學界逐漸受到重視，因為它利用價格具有訊息加總的功能，每每創造出良好的預測績效，但一個預測市場的建立在諸多原因下，通常不易吸引大規模的參與者，例如為免觸犯法令規定，以虛擬貨幣代替真錢進行交易，在缺乏真實貨幣的獲利誘因下，很難有效吸引參與者，即便真能以真實貨幣交易，若實驗的議題並非一般大眾感興趣的話題也不易吸引多數人參與，在這種情況下無法避免要面臨市場交易過於淺薄的問題，雖然不少文獻標榜淺薄市場不會影響預測市場的預測精準度，但並不表這是一個可以置之不理的問題。 本文以預測市場預測2006年北高市長選舉為實證基礎，闡明淺薄市場對價格產生的影響，以及這些影響將導致對未來事件的錯誤評價與推論，要避免這種錯誤的評價與推論唯有設法消除淺薄市場引發的干擾，因此我們提出了五種可以消除這些干擾的方法並從中選擇一較佳者。如同一般文獻的讚揚，我們再次從預測市場獲得精確的預測效果，同時證明所謂淺薄市場不影響預測市場的預測精準度前提乃在消除淺薄市場對價格產生的干擾之後才能還原這個真相。

My thesis contains essays on voting theory, market structures and fiscal federalism: (i) One Person, Many Votes: Divided Majority and Information Aggregation, (ii) Runoff Elections and the Condorcet Loser, (iii) On the Influence of Rankings when Product Quality Depends on Buyer Characteristics, and (iv) Redistributing Income under Fiscal Vertical Imbalance.<p><p>(i) One Person, Many Votes: Divided Majority and Information Aggregation (joint with Micael Castanheira)<p>In elections, majority divisions pave the way to focal manipulations and coordination failures, which can lead to the victory of the wrong candidate. This paper shows how this flaw can be addressed if voter preferences over candidates are sensitive to information. We consider two potential sources of divisions: majority voters may have similar preferences but opposite information about the candidates, or opposite preferences. We show that when information is the source of majority divisions, Approval Voting features a unique equilibrium with full information and coordination equivalence. That is, it produces the same outcome as if both information and coordination problems could be resolved. Other electoral systems, such as Plurality and Two-Round elections, do not satisfy this equivalence. The second source of division is opposite preferences. Whenever the fraction of voters with such preferences is not too large, Approval Voting still satisfies full information and coordination equivalence.<p><p>(ii) Runoff Elections and the Condorcet Loser<p>A crucial component of Runoff electoral systems is the threshold fraction of votes above which a candidate wins outright in the first round. I analyze the influence of this threshold on the voting equilibria in three-candidate Runoff elections. I demonstrate the existence of an Ortega Effect which may unduly favor dominated candidates and thus lead to the election of the Condorcet Loser in equilibrium. The reason is that, contrarily to commonly held beliefs, lowering the threshold for first-round victory may actually induce voters to express their preferences excessively. I also extend Duverger's Law to Runoff elections with any threshold below, equal or above 50%. Therefore, Runoff elections are plagued with inferior equilibria that induce either too high or too low expression of preferences.<p><p>(iii) On the Influence of Rankings when Product Quality Depends on Buyer Characteristics<p>Information on product quality is crucial for buyers to make sound choices. For "experience products", this information is not available at the time of the purchase: it is only acquired through consumption. For much experience products, there exist institutions that provide buyers with information about quality. It is commonly believed that such institutions help consumers to make better choices and are thus welfare improving.<p>The quality of various experience products depends on the characteristics of buyers. For instance, conversely to the quality of cars, business school quality depends on buyers (i.e. students) characteristics. Indeed, one of the main inputs of a business school is enrolled students. The choice of buyers for such products has then some features of a coordination problem: ceteris paribus, a buyer prefers to buy a product consumed by buyers with "good" characteristics. This coordination dimension leads to inefficiencies when buyers coordinate on products of lower "intrinsic" quality. When the quality of products depends on buyer characteristics, information about product quality can reinforce such a coordination problem. Indeed, even though information of high quality need not mean high intrinsic quality, rational buyers pay attention to this information because they prefer high quality products, no matter the reason of the high quality. Information about product quality may then induce buyers to coordinate on products of low intrinsic quality.<p>In this paper, I show that, for experience products which quality depends on the characteristics of buyers, more information is not necessarily better. More precisely, I prove that more information about product quality may lead to a Pareto deterioration, i.e. all buyers may be worse off due.<p><p>(iv) Redistributing Income under Fiscal Vertical Imbalance (joint with Marjorie Gassner and Vincenzo Verardi)<p>From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance (i.e. the dependence of subnational governments on national government revenues to support their expenditures) is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction of the extent of redistributive fiscal policies if the maximal size of government has been reached. To test for this empirically, we use some high quality data from the LIS dataset on individual incomes. The results are highly significant and point in the direction of our theoretical predictions.<p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

An iterative travel time forecasting scheme, named the Advanced Multilane Prediction based Real-time Fastest Path (AMPRFP) algorithm, is presented in this dissertation. This scheme is derived from the conventional kernel estimator based prediction model by the association of real-time nonlinear impacts that caused by neighboring arcs’ traffic patterns with the historical traffic behaviors. The AMPRFP algorithm is evaluated by prediction of the travel time of congested arcs in the urban area of Jacksonville City. Experiment results illustrate that the proposed scheme is able to significantly reduce both the relative mean error (RME) and the root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of the predicted travel time. To obtain high quality real-time traffic information, which is essential to the performance of the AMPRFP algorithm, a data clean scheme enhanced empirical learning (DCSEEL) algorithm is also introduced. This novel method investigates the correlation between distance and direction in the geometrical map, which is not considered in existing fingerprint localization methods. Specifically, empirical learning methods are applied to minimize the error that exists in the estimated distance. A direction filter is developed to clean joints that have negative influence to the localization accuracy. Synthetic experiments in urban, suburban and rural environments are designed to evaluate the performance of DCSEEL algorithm in determining the cellular probe’s position. The results show that the cellular probe’s localization accuracy can be notably improved by the DCSEEL algorithm. Additionally, a new fast correlation technique for overcoming the time efficiency problem of the existing correlation algorithm based floating car data (FCD) technique is developed. The matching process is transformed into a 1-dimensional (1-D) curve matching problem and the Fast Normalized Cross-Correlation (FNCC) algorithm is introduced to supersede the Pearson product Moment Correlation Co-efficient (PMCC) algorithm in order to achieve the real-time requirement of the FCD method. The fast correlation technique shows a significant improvement in reducing the computational cost without affecting the accuracy of the matching process.

Music is perceived and described very subjectively by every individual. Nowadays, people often get lost in their steadily growing, multi-placed, digital music collection. Existing music player and management applications get in trouble when dealing with poor metadata that is predominant in personal music collections. There are several music information services available that assist users by providing tools for precisely organising their music collection, or for presenting them new insights into their own music library and listening habits. However, it is still not the case that music consumers can seamlessly interact with all these auxiliary services directly from the place where they access their music individually. To profit from the manifold music and music-related knowledge that is or can be available via various information services, this information has to be gathered up, semantically federated, and integrated into a uniform knowledge base that can personalised represent this data in an appropriate visualisation to the users. This personalised semantic aggregation of music metadata from several sources is the gist of this thesis. The outlined solution particularly concentrates on users’ needs regarding music collection management which can strongly alternate between single human beings. The author’s proposal, the personal music knowledge base (PMKB), consists of a client-server architecture with uniform communication endpoints and an ontological knowledge representation model format that is able to represent the versatile information of its use cases. The PMKB concept is appropriate to cover the complete information flow life cycle, including the processes of user account initialisation, information service choice, individual information extraction, and proactive update notification. The PMKB implementation makes use of SemanticWeb technologies. Particularly the knowledge representation part of the PMKB vision is explained in this work. Several new Semantic Web ontologies are defined or existing ones are massively modified to meet the requirements of a personalised semantic federation of music and music-related data for managing personal music collections. The outcome is, amongst others, • a new vocabulary for describing the play back domain, • another one for representing information service categorisations and quality ratings, and • one that unites the beneficial parts of the existing advanced user modelling ontologies. The introduced vocabularies can be perfectly utilised in conjunction with the existing Music Ontology framework. Some RDFizers that also make use of the outlined ontologies in their mapping definitions, illustrate the fitness in practise of these specifications. A social evaluation method is applied to carry out an examination dealing with the reutilisation, application and feedback of the vocabularies that are explained in this work. This analysis shows that it is a good practise to properly publish Semantic Web ontologies with the help of some Linked Data principles and further basic SEO techniques to easily reach the searching audience, to avoid duplicates of such KR specifications, and, last but not least, to directly establish a \"shared understanding\". Due to their project-independence, the proposed vocabularies can be deployed in every knowledge representation model that needs their knowledge representation capacities. This thesis added its value to make the vision of a personal music knowledge base come true.

Music is perceived and described very subjectively by every individual. Nowadays, people often get lost in their steadily growing, multi-placed, digital music collection. Existing music player and management applications get in trouble when dealing with poor metadata that is predominant in personal music collections. There are several music information services available that assist users by providing tools for precisely organising their music collection, or for presenting them new insights into their own music library and listening habits. However, it is still not the case that music consumers can seamlessly interact with all these auxiliary services directly from the place where they access their music individually. To profit from the manifold music and music-related knowledge that is or can be available via various information services, this information has to be gathered up, semantically federated, and integrated into a uniform knowledge base that can personalised represent this data in an appropriate visualisation to the users. This personalised semantic aggregation of music metadata from several sources is the gist of this thesis. The outlined solution particularly concentrates on users’ needs regarding music collection management which can strongly alternate between single human beings. The author’s proposal, the personal music knowledge base (PMKB), consists of a client-server architecture with uniform communication endpoints and an ontological knowledge representation model format that is able to represent the versatile information of its use cases. The PMKB concept is appropriate to cover the complete information flow life cycle, including the processes of user account initialisation, information service choice, individual information extraction, and proactive update notification. The PMKB implementation makes use of SemanticWeb technologies. Particularly the knowledge representation part of the PMKB vision is explained in this work. Several new Semantic Web ontologies are defined or existing ones are massively modified to meet the requirements of a personalised semantic federation of music and music-related data for managing personal music collections. The outcome is, amongst others, • a new vocabulary for describing the play back domain, • another one for representing information service categorisations and quality ratings, and • one that unites the beneficial parts of the existing advanced user modelling ontologies. The introduced vocabularies can be perfectly utilised in conjunction with the existing Music Ontology framework. Some RDFizers that also make use of the outlined ontologies in their mapping definitions, illustrate the fitness in practise of these specifications. A social evaluation method is applied to carry out an examination dealing with the reutilisation, application and feedback of the vocabularies that are explained in this work. This analysis shows that it is a good practise to properly publish Semantic Web ontologies with the help of some Linked Data principles and further basic SEO techniques to easily reach the searching audience, to avoid duplicates of such KR specifications, and, last but not least, to directly establish a \"shared understanding\". Due to their project-independence, the proposed vocabularies can be deployed in every knowledge representation model that needs their knowledge representation capacities. This thesis added its value to make the vision of a personal music knowledge base come true.:1 Introduction and Background 11 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 1.2 Personal Music Collection Use Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 1.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 2 Music Information Management 17 2.1 Knowledge Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1.1 Knowledge Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.1.1.1 Knowledge Representation Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.1.1.2 Semantic Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.1.1.3 Ontologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.1.1.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.1.2 Knowledge Management Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.1.2.1 Information Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.1.2.2 Ontology-based Distributed Knowledge Management Systems . . 20 2.1.2.3 Knowledge Management System Design Guideline . . . . . . . . 21 2.1.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.2 Semantic Web Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.2.1 The Evolution of the World Wide Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Personal Music Knowledge Base Contents 2.2.1.1 The Hypertext Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2.2.1.2 The Normative Principles of Web Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2.2.1.3 The Semantic Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 2.2.2 Common Semantic Web Knowledge Representation Languages . . . . . . 25 2.2.3 Resource Description Levels and their Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 2.2.4 Semantic Web Knowledge Representation Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 2.2.4.1 Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 2.2.4.2 Mapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 2.2.4.3 Context Modelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 2.2.4.4 Storing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 2.2.4.5 Providing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 2.2.4.6 Consuming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 2.2.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 2.3 Music Content and Context Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 2.3.1 Categories of Musical Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 2.3.2 Music Metadata Formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 2.3.3 Music Metadata Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 2.3.3.1 Audio Signal Carrier Indexing Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 2.3.3.2 Music Recommendation and Discovery Services . . . . . . . . . . 42 2.3.3.3 Music Content and Context Analysis Services . . . . . . . . . . . 43 2.3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 2.4 Personalisation and Environmental Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 2.4.1 User Modelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 2.4.2 Context Modelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 2.4.3 Stereotype Modelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 2.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 3 The Personal Music Knowledge Base 48 3.1 Foundations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 3.1.1 Knowledge Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 3.1.2 Knowledge Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 3.2 Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 3.3 Workflow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3.3.1 User Account Initialisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3.3.2 Individual Information Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3.3.3 Information Service Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 3.3.4 Proactive Update Notification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 3.3.5 Information Exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 3.3.6 Personal Associations and Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 4 A Personal Music Knowledge Base 57 4.1 Knowledge Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4.1.1 The Info Service Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4.1.2 The Play Back Ontology and related Ontologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4.1.2.1 The Ordered List Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4.1.2.2 The Counter Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 4.1.2.3 The Association Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 4.1.2.4 The Play Back Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 4.1.3 The Recommendation Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 4.1.4 The Cognitive Characteristics Ontology and related Vocabularies . . . . . . 72 4.1.4.1 The Weighting Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 4.1.4.2 The Cognitive Characteristics Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 4.1.4.3 The Property Reification Vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 4.1.5 The Media Types Taxonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 4.1.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 4.2 Knowledge Management System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 4.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 5 Personal Music Knowledge Base in Practice 87 5.1 Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 5.1.1 AudioScrobbler RDF Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 5.1.2 PMKB ID3 Tag Extractor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 5.2 Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 5.2.1 Reutilisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 5.2.2 Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 5.2.3 Reviews and Mentions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 5.2.4 Indexing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 5.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 6 Conclusion and Future Work 93 6.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 6.2 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94