Internet computing enables the construction of large-scale and complex applications by aggregating and sharing computational, data and other resources across institutional boundaries. The agent model can address the ever-increasing challenges of scalability and complexity, driven by the prevalence of Internet computing, by its intrinsic properties of autonomy and reactivity, which support the flexible management of application execution in distributed, open, and dynamic environments. However, the non-deterministic behaviour of autonomous agents leads to a lack of control, which complicates exception management in the system, thus threatening the robustness and reliability of the system, because improperly handled exceptions may cause unexpected system failure and crashes. / In this dissertation, we investigate and develop mechanisms to integrate intrinsic support for concurrency control, exception handling, recoverability, and robustness into multi-agent systems. The research covers agent specification, planning and scheduling, execution, and overall coordination, in order to reduce the impact of environmental uncertainty. Simulation results confirm that our model can improve the robustness and performance of the system, while relieving developers from dealing with the low level complexity of exception handling. / A survey, along with a taxonomy, of existing proposals and approaches for building robust multi-agent systems is provided first. In addition, the merits and limitations of each category are highlighted. / Next, we introduce the ARTS (Agent-Oriented Robust Transactional System) platform which allows agent developers to compose recursively-defined, atomically-handled tasks to specify scoped and hierarchically-organized exception-handling plans for a given goal. ARTS then supports automatic selection, execution, and monitoring of appropriate plans in a systematic way, for both normal and recovery executions. Moreover, we propose multiple-step backtracking, which extends the existing step-by-step plan reversal, to serve as the default exception handling and recovery mechanism in ARTS. This mechanism utilizes previous planning results in determining the response to a failure, and allows a substitutable path to start, prior to, or in parallel with, the compensation process, thus allowing an agent to achieve its goals more directly and efficiently. ARTS helps developers to focus on high-level business logic and relaxes them from considering low-level complexity of exception management. / One of the reasons for the occurrence of exceptions in a multi-agent system is that agents are unable to adhere to their commitments. We propose two scheduling algorithms for minimising such exceptions when commitments are unreliable. The first scheduling algorithm is trust-based scheduling, which incorporates the concept of trust, that is, the probability that an agent will comply with its commitments, along with the constraints of system budget and deadline, to improve the predictability and stability of the schedule. Trust-based scheduling supports the runtime adaptation and evolvement of the schedule by interleaving the processes of evaluation, scheduling, execution, and monitoring in the life cycle of a plan. The second scheduling algorithm is commitment-based scheduling, which focuses on the interaction and coordination protocol among agents, and augments agents with the ability to reason about and manipulate their commitments. Commitment-based scheduling supports the refactoring and parallel execution of commitments to maximize the system's overall robustness and performance. While the first scheduling algorithm needs to be performed by a central coordinator, the second algorithm is designed to be distributed and embedded into the individual agent. / Finally, we discuss the integration of our approaches into Internet-based applications, to build flexible but robust systems. Specifically, we discuss the designs of an adaptive business process management system and of robust scientific workflow scheduling.

Dissertation : Berlin :Freie Universitat Berlin, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 254-294)

ABSTRACT Owing to the negative effect from ¡§Internet Bubbling¡¨, electronic commerce doesn¡¦t seem to be prosperous like before. But relevant researches indicate that ¡§Internet ticket agency¡¨ will be the most profitable business in e-commerce in the future. As a result, this thesis wants to study the operation of the Internet ticket agencies in Taiwan. Collecting related documents and interviewing ticket agencies in order to understand the real operation situation of ticket agencies in Taiwan. Then discuss the impact of Internet on the ticket industry. Utilizing Williamson¡¦s transaction cost economics, this thesis analyzes the transaction cost between traditional and Internet ticket agencies. And concluding six topics below from these observations and analyses: 1. There is a serious impact of the Internet on the ticket price structure, and reduces the profits of ticket providers. 2. Internet ticket agencies must provide more value-added service in order to attract more customers. 3. Self-conducting Internet personal ticket distributor will withdraw from the market. 4. Air companies will expand the existent alliances relationship on Internet ticket market, and have dominant competitive advantage on personal ticket selling. 5. Internet ticket agencies will cooperate with other companies from different industry. 6. The Internet technology will not be the key factor of competitive advantage.

Presidents have two major assets at their disposal when seeking to alter policy: executive orders and legislative action. There are certain advantages and disadvantages to each course. Although presidency scholars have focused extensively on presidential efforts in the legislative arena, little attention has been paid to how a president affects policy through direct action. Because executive orders have been under-researched, there has been a dearth of theory development that adequately explains when presidents will act unilaterally through executive orders and when they will instead seek legislative avenues to policy change. This project develops a parsimonious theory grounded in the transaction costs framework that explains how a president chooses between seeking congressional action versus acting unilaterally through executive orders to accomplish policy change. The theory holds that when presidents desire policy change, they balance the transaction costs executive orders and legislative action present, selecting the course that presents the greatest benefit after accounting for the transaction costs present. After outlining the theory, I test my predictions using an original data set. Each executive order from 1946 to 2004 was read and examined for policy content. Unlike most prior studies of presidential use of executive orders, this study only includes orders that affect policy in the data analyses. The series of empirical tests provide support for my theory: Presidents consider the transaction costs that executive orders and the pursuit of legislation pose and take the action that maximizes their utility when seeking policy change

The aim of this thesis is to explore the applicability of transaction cost theory to an emerging market context, and to complement it with institutional theory to achieve a closer fit. The research questions are: (1) Which causes of high transaction costs are perceived by firms in the research site? (2) How do they respond to these costs? The responses could range from internalisation, through cooperation, to the new concept of trading isolation, which is the first of two observed gaps in the literature. (3) Could an institutional perspective help to explain firms’ responses, if they differ from what is expected by theory? The consideration of informal institutions with regard to transaction costs in China addresses the second observed gap in the literature, which focuses mostly on formal institutions. Despite the strengths of transaction cost theory in identifying sources of friction in exchange and proposing resolutions, it has been criticised for making assumptions concerning behaviour and the strength of formal institutions that reduce the degree to which it applies in non-Western, emerging market research contexts. This thesis explores these limitations in the context of the inbound tourism sector in the Tiger Leaping Gorge, in rural Yunnan Province, Southwest China. The author’s exploratory study had suggested that some of these firms attempted to reduce transaction costs by decreasing the number of transactions conducted, resulting in their relative isolation from – rather than integration into – a trading network. This hinders the firms’ ability to develop and specialise, limiting their contribution to local economic growth in this relatively undeveloped region of China. In the principal field study, qualitative data were collected through interviews conducted with the proprietors of the population of tourism firms in the research site. The interviews sought to understand the transaction costs the proprietors perceived, their views of institutional strength or weakness (in areas including local government, legal system, financing, development of trust, kinship, guanxi and networks), and the ways they organised their firms. The data were explored first with a thematic analysis, then by coding into fuzzy sets for analysis with the Qualitative Comparative Approach to help identify causal associations between transaction costs, institutions, and responses of isolation from or integration into the market. The main causes of transaction costs were found to be opportunism, uncertainty and bounded rationality. High transaction costs were generally associated with a response of isolation, but they were not the sole causal factor: every isolated firm reported weak informal institutions combined with a variety of transaction cost and formal institutional conditions. The difficulty of establishing new trust relationships increased the isolation of the worst-affected firms, in an environment where weak formal protection from transaction risks confined many firms to personal exchange. A recommendation for local practice is made for firms to attempt to broaden the networks within which they develop trust, to reduce the constraint of personal exchange and consequent isolation. Two policy recommendations are made that could apply here and in emerging markets more generally: a mainstream recommendation to strengthen the enforcement of formal institutions, aiming to facilitate rule-based, impersonal exchange based on generalised trust, and an alternative approach deriving recommendations from the local context and including the consideration of informal institutions. This thesis contributes to theory by highlighting the critical influence of informal social structures on the cost and extent of exchange, and adapting transaction cost theory to better apply to this institutional context. It also constitutes a novel application of the Qualitative Comparative Approach to interview data.

The objective of this project was to design and test a secure IP-based architecture suitable for short duration transactions. This included the development of a prototype test-bed in which various operating scenarios (such as cryptographic options, various IP-based architectures and fault tolerance) were demonstrated. A solution based on SIP secured with TLS was tested on two IP based architectures. Total time, CPU time and heap usage was measured for each architecture and encryption scheme to examine the viability of such a solution. The results showed that the proposed solution stack was able to complete transactions in reasonable time and was able to recover from transaction processor failure. This research has demonstrated a possible architecture and protocol stack suitable for IP-based transaction networks. The benefits of an IP-based transaction network include reduced operating costs for network providers and clients, as shared IP infrastructure is used, instead of maintaining a separate IP and X.25 network.

Departing from a theoretical problem, reinforced by a practical dilemma, this study set out to explore the dialectics between the transactional and relationship perspective that PR and advertising marketers must handle in their customer relations. Formulating the study from established transaction and relationship marketing theories and using qualitative interviews with PR and advertising practitioners, we have explored how two contradicting perspectives surface in the customer interactions. The results show that there is a need for both perspectives to coexist and that the balance in between them is constantly shifting.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 1988. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-85). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Dissertation : Berlin :Freie Universitat Berlin, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 254-294)