A Multi-Criteria Approach to Decision Making in Broadband Technology Selection

A new European Union regulatory framework for the telecom sector has been under a process of transposition to national laws by its member states that should have been completed by the end of 2020, notwithstanding some delays. A core purpose of the regulatory framework is to guarantee that most citizens will have access to very fast Internet connections, capable of 100 Mbps download link speed, regardless of where they live. According to this new framework, in areas where the market does not deliver, governments are to launch public tenders for the deployment, maintenance, and operations of network infrastructure as well as services, and public funds should be used to support the deployment of these broadband networks in less densely populated areas. Needless to say, public tenders of this nature are subject to different criteria when it comes to candidate evaluation. In this paper, we present a decision model for the selection of operators to deploy and maintain broadband networks in scarcely populated areas, taking into consideration infrastructure costs, the technical quality offered by the solutions, and the credibility of the candidates. We suggest an integrated multi-stakeholder multi-criteria approach and demonstrate how it can be used in this complex area and find that in the example provided, taking a relevant set of criteria into the analysis, optical fibre networks hold much higher chances to be used in these public tenders compared to networks based on the broadly favoured 5G technology.

Reformulation of Public Help Index θ Using Null Player Free Winning Coalitions

This paper proposes a new representation for the Public Help Index θ (briefly, PHI θ). Based on winning coalitions, the PHI θ index was introduced by Bertini et al. in (2008). The goal of this article is to reformulate the PHI θ index using null player free winning coalitions. The set of these coalitions unequivocally defines a simple game. Expressing the PHI θ index by the winning coalitions that do not contain null players allows us in a transparent way to show the parts of the power assigned to null and non-null players in a simple game. Moreover, this new representation may imply a reduction of computational cost (in the sense of space complexity) in algorithms to compute the PHI θ index if at least one of the players is a null player. We also discuss some relationships among the Holler index, the PHI θ index, and the gnp index (based on null player free winning coalitions) proposed by Álvarez-Mozos et al. in (2015).

An Agent that Facilitates Crowd Discussion

Online discussion platforms are perceived as the next-generation method of citizen involvement. Such platforms can collect, integrate, and synthesize opinions to achieve social good. Crowd-scale platforms are being developed and deployed in social experiments that involve citizens and local governments. In such platforms, human facilitation is often used to preserve the quality of the discussions. Human facilitators often face difficulties when the discussions grow in size. In this paper, we present “D-agree,” a crowd-scale discussion support system based on an automated facilitation agent. The agent extracts discussion structures from online discussions, analyzes them, and posts facilitation messages. We conducted small- and large-scale social experiments in Japan to assess the social impact of the platform. The results showcase the success of our automated facilitation agents in gathering valuable opinions from citizens. In addition, our experiments highlight the effect of an automated facilitation agent on online discussions. In particular, we find that combining the agent facilitator with human facilitators leads to higher user satisfaction.