Related papers: Temporal Discounting in Technical Debt: How do Sof…
Complex engineered systems routinely face schedule and cost overruns, along with poor post-deployment performance. Championed by both INCOSE and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the systems engineering (SE) community has increasingly…
We examine how career concerns influence the behavior and mobility of financial advisers. Drawing on a uniquely comprehensive matched panel that combines employer-employee data with a longstanding national ranking, our study tests…
Software Engineering (SE) experiments are traditionally analyzed with statistical tests (e.g., t-tests, ANOVAs, etc.) that assume equally spread data across treatments (i.e., the homogeneity of variances assumption). Differences across…
Managing technical debt (TD) is essential for maintaining long-term software projects. Nonetheless, the time and cost involved in technical debt management (TDM) are often high, which may lead practitioners to omit TDM tasks. The adoption…
Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…
Stochastic games with discounted payoff, introduced by Shapley, model adversarial interactions in stochastic environments where two players try to optimize a discounted sum of rewards. In this model, long-term weights are geometrically…
Scheduling with testing is a recent online problem within the framework of explorable uncertainty motivated by environments where some preliminary action can influence the duration of a task. Jobs have an unknown processing time that can be…
We study the use of Temporal-Difference learning for estimating the structural parameters in dynamic discrete choice models. Our algorithms are based on the conditional choice probability approach but use functional approximations to…
Applications and systems are constantly faced with decisions that require picking from a set of actions based on contextual information. Reinforcement-based learning algorithms such as contextual bandits can be very effective in these…
Understanding and effectively managing Technical Debt (TD) remains a vital challenge in software engineering. While many studies on code-level TD have been published, few illustrate the business impact of low-quality source code. In this…
We consider a dynamic pricing problem for repeated contextual second-price auctions with multiple strategic buyers who aim to maximize their long-term time discounted utility. The seller has limited information on buyers' overall demand…
Software practitioners can make sub-optimal decisions concerning requirements during gathering, documenting, prioritizing, and implementing requirements as software features or architectural design decisions -- this is captured by the…
Price discrimination, which refers to the strategy of setting different prices for different customer groups, has been widely used in online retailing. Although it helps boost the collected revenue for online retailers, it might create…
An important question in economics is how people choose between different payments in the future. The classical normative model predicts that a decision maker discounts a later payment relative to an earlier one by an exponential function…
Canonical models of Markov decision processes (MDPs) usually consider geometric discounting based on a constant discount factor. While this standard modeling approach has led to many elegant results, some recent studies indicate the…
Predictive models are often introduced to decision-making tasks under the rationale that they improve performance over an existing decision-making policy. However, it is challenging to compare predictive performance against an existing…
Technical debt---design shortcuts taken to optimize for delivery speed---is a critical part of long-term software costs. Consequently, automatically detecting technical debt is a high priority for software practitioners. Software quality…
This survey reviews recent developments in revealed preference theory. It discusses the testable implications of theories of choice that are germane to specific economic environments. The focus is on expected utility in risky environments;…
The problem of scheduling with testing in the framework of explorable uncertainty models environments where some preliminary action can influence the duration of a task. In the model, each job has an unknown processing time that can be…
Given a batch of human computation tasks, a commonly ignored aspect is how the price (i.e., the reward paid to human workers) of these tasks must be set or varied in order to meet latency or cost constraints. Often, the price is set…