This dissertation consists of three essays, of which, two involve assessing the value of tree cover in urban communities and the other evaluates cooperative management of an invasive species by urban communities. The first chapter summarizes the three topics and briefly describes the motivation, methods applied and main conclusions in each study. Chapter 2 presents a meta-analysis of hedonic property value studies on the value of tree cover. A meta-regression was performed using implicit value estimates for tree cover at property-level from various locations in the U.S. along with auxiliary data of county-level tree cover to investigate the relationship between tree cover and implicit-price estimates for residential properties. The study found that on average 35 percent and 40 percent tree cover respectively at property-level and county-level optimize the benefits to the property owners in urban areas. These results provide insights to forward-looking communities to adapt their tree planting and protection efforts to lessen climate-induced impacts. Chapter 3 applies a first-stage Hedonic property price model to estimate preference for tree cover in urban communities using single-family house sales data from multiple property markets across the U.S. The study analyses how home owners' preference for tree cover vary across the landscape and across cities. Further, it identifies what factors affect these variations via the general inferences obtained from an internal meta-analysis. The study confirms the heterogeneity of preferences as affected by the differences in the abundance of tree cover in study locations, regional differences and household characteristics. These findings add to the hedonic literature and provide useful information for future urban planning. Chapter 4 focuses on cooperative management of invasive species in landscapes with mixed land ownerships. This study analyzes the effect of the land ownership on the management efforts between an infested municipality and an uninfested municipality when a transferable payment scheme is involved in the cooperative agreement. A dynamic optimization problem was set up to evaluate the case of Emerald ash borer (EAB) control in multiple jurisdictions in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. The results suggest that when the infested municipality has more public lands and when the transfer payments are efficiently used to implement greater control, the municipalities are more likely to commit to bargaining, and smaller transfer payments paid over a longer span of time are sufficient for optimal control of the spread of invasive species across the municipalities. The last chapter concludes the three studies and discusses the insights for future research. / Ph. D. / Mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae) are a native insect that has decimated millions of hectares of mature pine forests in western North America. The purpose of this study was to investigate, using GIS-derived variables, biophysical and climatic factors that have influenced past mountain pine beetle insect outbreaks, as evident by beetle-induced tree mortality in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem (CCE) from 1962 to 2014. Specific objectives of this study were to determine how selected biophysical variables (slope, aspect, elevation, and latitude), regional climate variables (temperature, precipitation, and drought) and global climate oscillations (ENSO, PDO, NAO, AO, and PNA) relate to bark beetle infestations in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem from 1962 through 2014, as measured by aerial surveyrecorded tree mortality. We sought to contextualize the results of the statistical models with historical data to further understand the relationship between increases and decreases of tree mortality by comparing these trends to geopotential height and sea-surface temperatures that may influence CCE climate. Our work revealed first, that while the aerial survey data has important limitations, overall it is a useful dataset for analyzing historical spatio-temporal patterns of insect infestations. Second, there appears to be a link between local biophysical factors, such as latitude, elevation, and winter precipitation (as opposed to global climate factors) and tree mortality within the CCE. Local climate analysis revealed the importance of winter precipitation to be the biggest influence of MPB decrease or increase along with lower geopotential heights during a decline in MPB spread over the CCE. Finally, a combination of a negative PDO and El Niño was important in forecasting a decline in MPB spread, as shown by damage, during a given year. This is the first study to use aerial survey data in a geospatial analysis incorporating biophysical variables for the US portion of the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem. Additionally, this study is unique to explore the potential relationship between global teleconnections and regional climate in the CCE area, and the spatio-temporal extent of mountain pine beetle infestations.Urban trees have become a key resource in building sustainable communities. Knowledge of preferences for trees, costs and benefits of trees, and how trees are managed by private and public landowners, is indispensable in making targeted planning that would fulfill the economic, social and environmental objectives of the urban communities This dissertation explores on these topics in three papers. Chapter 1 summarizes the three topics and briefly describes the motivation, methods applied and main conclusions in each study. Chapter 2 presents a meta-analysis that combines the non-market value estimates for tree cover from previous hedonic studies from various locations in the U.S. along with auxiliary data to investigate the relationship between the level of tree cover and value estimates. The study found that on average 35% and 40% tree cover respectively at property-level and county-level optimize the benefits to the property owners. Chapter 3 analyses how home owners’ preferences for trees vary across the landscape in multiple cities in the U.S., and the results are systematically summarized via an internal-meta analysis. The study confirms the preference heterogeneity across the landscape and found that the relative abundance of tree cover in study locations, regional differences and household characteristics affect the preferences. Chapter 4 develops a dynamic optimization model to study how private and public land ownership in local municipalities affects the cooperative management of urban trees to control the Emerald ash borer (EAB) infestation in Twin Cities, Minnesota. The results suggest that when an infested municipality has more public lands and when the transfer payments are efficiently used to implement greater control, the municipalities are more likely to commit to bargaining agreements that last for longer period of time. Results from the three studies provide insights to forward-looking communities to adapt their tree planting and protection efforts to lessen climate-induced impacts. The last chapter concludes the three studies and discusses the insights for future research.

In next generation wireless networks such as 4G- LTE and WiMax, the demand for high data rates, the scarcity of wireless resources and the time varying channel conditions has led to the adoption of more sophisticated and robust techniques in PHY such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and the corresponding access technique known as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA). Cross-layer schedulers have been developed in order to describe the procedure of resource allocation in OFDMA wireless networks. The resource allocation in OFDMA wireless networks has received great attention in research, by proposing many different ways for frequency diversity exploitation and system’s optimization. Many cross-layer proposals for dynamic resource allocation have been investigated in literature approaching the optimization problem from different viewpoints i.e. maximizing total data rate, minimizing total transmit power, satisfying minimum users’ requirements or providing fairness amongst users. The design of a cross-layer scheduler for OFDMA wireless networks is the topic of this research. The scheduler utilizes game theory in order to make decisions for subcarrier and power allocation to the users with the main concern being to maintain fairness as well as to maximize overall system’s performance. A very well known theorem in cooperative game theory, the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS), is employed and solved in a close form way, resulting in a Pareto optimal solution. Two different cases are proposed. The first one is the symmetric NBS (S-NBS) where all users have the same weight and therefore all users have the same opportunity for resources and the second one, is the asymmetric NBS (A-NBS), where users have different weights, hence different priorities where the scheduler favours users with higher priorities at expense of lower priority users. As MAC layer is vital for cross-layer, the scheduler is combined with a queuing model based on Markov chain in order to describe more realistically the incoming procedure from the higher layers.

We present an in-depth analysis of the music industry and use our findings to judge the practical assumptions and design of an original theoretical model. The model is in three stages, where, in a Hotelling-type framework, the last agents to act are consumers who choose between copying, purchasing, or staying out of the market for music. Prior to the last stage, the record label chooses its profit maximizing price and, in the first stage, we incorporate the artist-label bargaining agreement into a theoretical framework using the Nash cooperative bargaining solution. The current structure of the music industry is a combination of the oligopoly and monopolistic competition models, consisting of five major labels and many independents. Despite major labels' advantage in large-scale distribution, we argue that digital downloading has the potential to radically alter the current industry structure, and that artists would be unable to sell their music in such an environment without enforceable copyrights. Our model assumes that the most important determinants of CD and copy demand are consumers' tastes and transaction costs of copying, CD prices, and the substitutability between CDs and copies. We hypothesize that Internet file-sharing has been undertaken by both consumers who were previously not in the market, and by those who decided to copy rather than buy. In regard to firm strategy, the model suggests that labels could increase the sales of CDs by trying to increase consumers' taste for music, perhaps by reducing the price of CDs. Our model also predicts a positive relationship between artists' optimal share of album sales and their bargaining power, as well as a negative relationship between artists' optimal share and their risk aversion. Since lowering the reliance on labels for distribution would increase artists' bargaining power, our model predicts that artists' share of profits should increase as legitimate digital distribution gains prominence. We also provide empirical testing of our hypothesis that some music file-sharing has been done by consumers frequently not in the market. After examining consumers' expenditures and aggregate industry sales, we are unable to reject our hypothesis

Future wireless communications expect to experience a spectrum shortage problem. One practical solution is spectrum sharing. This thesis studies precoding strategies to allocate communication resources for spectrum sharing in multi-user wireless systems from a game-theoretic perspective. The approaches for the precoding games are developed under different constraints. It is shown that the precoding game with spectral mask constraints can be formulated as a convex optimization problem and a dual decomposition based algorithm can be exploited to solve it. However, the problem is non-convex if users also have total power constraints. This study shows that an efficient sub-optimal solution can be derived by allocating the bottleneck resource in the system. The sub-optimal solution is proved to be efficient and can even achieve an identical performance to that of the optimal solution in certain cases, but with significantly reduced complexity. / Communications

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No description available.

We consider two game-theoretic settings to determine the optimal values of an issuer's interchange fee rate, an acquirer's merchant discount rate, and a merchant's retail prices for multiple products in a credit card network. In the first setting, we investigate a two-stage game problem in which the issuer and the acquirer first negotiate the interchange fee rate, and the acquirer and the retailer then determine their merchant discount rate and retail prices, respectively. In the second setting, motivated by the recent U.S. bill "H.R. 2695," we develop a three-player cooperative game in which the issuer, the acquirer, and the merchant form a grand coalition and bargain over the interchange fee rate and the merchant discount rate. Following the cooperative game, the retailer makes its retail pricing decisions. We derive both the Shapley value- and the nucleolus-characterized unique rates for the grand coalition. Comparing the two game settings, we show that the participation of the merchant in the negotiation process can result in the reduction of both rates. Moreover, the stability of the grand coalition in the cooperative game setting may require that the merchant should delegate the credit card business only to the issuer and the acquirer with sufficiently low operation costs. We also find that the large, highly-specialized merchants and banks are more likely to join the cooperative negotiation whereas the small firms may prefer the two-stage game setting. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the acquirer's and the issuer's unit operation costs more significantly impact both rates in the cooperative game setting than in the two-stage game setting.

在各國職業運動的發展中，自由球員制度的出現醞釀出了大革命。本文以一賽局模型，利用Nash 議價及 Shapley 值等數學模型的輔助，嘗試探討自由球員制度出現後球員及球團效用的增減。最後，我們得到談判力量大小左右了勞資雙方談薪優勢或劣勢這樣的結果。當球團擁有高於球員的談判力量時，即使在自由球員制度下球團仍然獲益。

Cette thèse étudie l’incorporation des préférences sociales typiques, telles que le souci de justice et la réciprocité, dans la chaîne logistique. Les impacts de ces préférences sociales sur la prise de décisions dans la chaîne logistique, sur l’efficacité et la coordination du canal de distribution sont étudiés. Plus spécifiquement, la thèse se focalise sur trois questions essentielles ci-dessous : 1. Qu’est-ce qui différencie un canal conventionnel d’un canal comportemental qui prend en compte la justice et/ou la réciprocité par exemple ? 2. Comment ces facteurs comportementaux influencent-ils la prise de décisions du fournisseur et du distributeur dans la chaîne logistique ? 3. Quels effets ont ces préférences sociales sur la coordination du canal de distribution et sur son efficacité ? Afin de répondre à ces questions, nous développons deux modèles d’opérations comportementales. Nous construisons d’abord un modèle de vendeur de journaux pour une chaîne logistique dyadique avec prise en compte de justice dans un processus de négociation de Nash. Dans ce modèle, un fournisseur joue un jeu de Stackelberg avec un distributeur qui doit faire face à une demande aléatoire. La solution de Nash est utilisèe comme référence de justice pour formellement décrire un compromis perçu comme juste, ce qui constitue une nouvelle manière de traiter la justice dans une chaîne logistique. Ensuite nous étudions un canal de distribution similaire mais où le fournisseur et le distributeur ont une préférence pour la réciprocité et la demande est supposée déterministe. Dans ce modèle, l’impact de l’intention dans une chaîne logistique est étudié pour la première fois. Des analyses approfondies de ces modèles comportementaux nous permettent de tirer des aperçus managériaux intéressants,comme par exemple le fait que le souci de justice joue un rôle important sur la difficulté de coordonner un canal de distribution. Nous avons démontré qu’un canal dyadique avec prise en compte de réciprocité peut être coordonné en utilisant un prix de gros constant, ce qui signifie que le problème de double marginalisation ne se pose pas nécessairement tout le temps. / This thesis studies how to incorporate typical social preferences, such as fairness concerns and reciprocity, into the context of supply chain. The impacts of theses social preferences on the supply chain’s decisions, channel efficiency and coordination are investigated. Specifically, it focuses on three important questions as follows: 1, what are the differences between the conventional channel and the behavioral channel (e.g., fairness-concerned channel and reciprocal channel)? 2, how do these behavioral factors influence the decisions of the supplier and the retailer in the supply chain? 3, what effects have these social preferences on the coordination of the channel and its efficiency? In order to answer these questions, two models of behavioral operations are formulated. A newsvendor model for a dyadic supply chain with Nash bargaining fairness concerns is built first. In this model, a supplier plays Stackelberg game with a retailer who faces stochastic demand. Nash bargaining solution is used as fairness reference to formally depict perceptively fair compromise, which is a new perspective to study fairness concerns in a supply chain. Then a similar dyadic channel in which a retailer and/or a supplier have a preference for reciprocity is investigated, but the retailer is facing deterministic demand. In this model, the impact of intention is studied within the context of supply chain for the first time. Some interesting and valuable managerial insights are drawn by analyzing the two behavioral models. For example, fairness concern does have great impact on the difficulty of coordinating a channel. In addition, the dyadic channel with reciprocity can be coordinated by using a constant wholesale price, which implies that the problem of double marginalization is not necessary to be present all the time.

Submitted by Lucas Alves Estevam de Lima (lucasaelima@gmail.com) on 2015-07-06T18:54:09Z No. of bitstreams: 1 dissertacao_lucas.pdf: 1226857 bytes, checksum: 0bfcc2903f4c75498fd9961c5b53ae21 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by BRUNA BARROS (bruna.barros@fgv.br) on 2015-07-07T12:23:12Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 dissertacao_lucas.pdf: 1226857 bytes, checksum: 0bfcc2903f4c75498fd9961c5b53ae21 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2015-07-09T12:13:05Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 dissertacao_lucas.pdf: 1226857 bytes, checksum: 0bfcc2903f4c75498fd9961c5b53ae21 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-09T12:13:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 dissertacao_lucas.pdf: 1226857 bytes, checksum: 0bfcc2903f4c75498fd9961c5b53ae21 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-04-29 / This dissertation presents a alternative approach to deai with family taxation probiem. More specifically we modei lhe family decision as a Nash Bargaining where the pianner can choose optimally lhe disagreement utilities. We prove a Reveiation Principie for this modei so we can consider a smaller set of mechanisms, besides that we compute optimai mechanism gains compareci to other reasonabie mechanism through exampies. We discuss some implications o f lhe optimai mechanism. / Esta dissertação apresenta uma abordagem alternativa para o problema de taxação de famílias. Mais especificamente modelamos a decisão familiar com um modelo de barganha de Nash em que os o governo determina de forma ótima as utilidades de discórdia. Demonstramos um Princípio da Revelação para esse modelo de forma a reduzir a classe de mecanismos possíveis, além disso calculamos os ganhos do mecanismo ótimo em relação a outros mecanismos razoáveis por meio de exemplos. Discutimos algumas implicações associadas ao mecanismo ótimo.