Towards a complete real-time electricity market design

The general design for the real-time electricity market presented in this paper optimizes and prices both real and reactive power simultaneously in an AC setting, where all assets—generation, load and transmission—are allowed to bid and are financially settled at the locational price times energy consumed or produced. The result is that transmission lines are compensated for both capacity and admittance, providing incentives for efficient operation of transmission-related assets such as FACTS devices, if price-taking behavior is assumed. Losses are incorporated into the design and become an operating cost for transmission. The market design is shown to be revenue neutral and, under some assumptions, nonconfiscatory.      

A generalization of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem to weighted voting games with many small voters

We extend Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix. De l’imprimerie royale, 1785) to weighted voting games with voters of two kinds: a fixed (possibly empty) set of ‘major’ voters with fixed weights, and an ever-increasing number of ‘minor’ voters, whose total weight is also fixed, but where each individual’s weight becomes negligible. As our main result, we obtain the limiting probability that the jury will arrive at the correct decision as a function of the competence of the few major players. As in Condorcet’s result the quota q = 1/2 is found to play a prominent role. I wish to thank Maurice Koster, Moshé Machover, Guillermo Owen and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.     

Background Risk and the Performance of Insurance Markets under Adverse Selection

Background risk can influence the performance of insurance markets that must deal with adverse selection when applicants are risk vulnerable, since they are more averse to bearing the insurable risk as a result of their exposures to background risk. We show that background risk always results in a lower deductible for the incentive constrained contract, and that a broader range of markets attains the stable sequential equilibrium cross-subsidized pair of separating contracts. We conclude that background risk always improves the performance of markets for coverage against (insurable) foreground risks that must deal with adverse selection. We also find, however, that these improvements are never sufficient to offset the cost to insureds of bearing the background risk.     

布列塔尼的微笑

三位来自中国山东的摄影家,虽然离开法国布列塔尼大区已有一个月之久了,但他们却依然感到布列塔尼人民所给予他们的友好情谊时时环绕在身边,让·比尔、雅克琳娜、苏蒂芬、妮可儿、大卫……一个个热情、真诚的面容时时浮现在眼前,布列塔尼的微笑已经永远印在了中国摄影家们心中的底片上。     

中小企业取胜之道——逆向营销

美国一家规模较小、经营内容与其他竞争对手雷同的银行，尽管内部人员从上到下工作都很努力，但整体经营情况却很是一般。一次该银行在其汽车贷款业务中，发现了一个因为内部流程改变而产生的一项竞争优势——即以24小时完成现在竞争对手48小时才能完成的汽车贷款手续。     

汉诺坝玄武岩中麻粒岩捕虏体的发现

近十余年来,中外地质学家对我国河北西北部的汉诺坝玄武岩及其深源包体进行了广泛深入的研究,发现了种类繁多的上地幔岩石捕虏体,发表了不少专著和论文,但有关麻粒岩捕虏体的报导,迄今为止尚未见到。本文作者经过三年的努力,在汉诺坝玄武岩中发现了五类八种麻粒岩捕虏体,其中包括石榴辉石麻粒岩、斜长石榴辉石麻粒岩、斜长单辉麻粒岩、斜长二辉麻粒岩、石榴钾长石英麻粒岩、石榴斜长石英麻粒岩、辉石二长麻粒岩、辉石钾长麻粒岩。初步研究表明这些麻粒岩大部分是在下地壳环境下形成的,它们具有麻粒岩矿物组合和结构构造特征,但又不完全类同于古老高级变质地体中的麻粒岩。     

Marginal distributions of sequential and generalized order statistics

Expressions for marginal distribution functions of sequential order statistics and generalized order statistics are presented without any restrictions imposed on the model parameters. The results are related to the relevation transform, to the distribution of the product of Beta distributed random variables, and to Meijers G-functions. Some selected applications in the areas of moments, conditional distributions, recurrence relations, and reliability properties are shown. Key words:Order statistics; Generalized order statistics; Sequential order statistics; Record values; Distribution theory; Meijers G-function; Recurrence relations; Reliability properties.