Illegal Online File Sharing, Decision-Analysis, and the Pricing of Digital Goods

Illegal online file sharing costs companies tens of billions of dollars of lost revenues around the world annually and results in lost productivity, various psychological issues, and significant reduction of incentives to create and innovate. Legislative, technical, and enforcement efforts have failed. This book presents psychological theories about why people illegally share files online; analyzes and characterizes optimal sanctions for illegal online file sharing; introduces new models for pricing of network-access and digital-content to help reduce illegal online file sharing; introduces new content control and P2P systems; and explains why game theory does not work in pricing of network access.

Designed to benefit scientific and engineering applications, Numerical Methods for Engineers and Scientists Using MATLAB focuses on the fundamentals of numerical methods while making use of MATLAB software. The book introduces MATLAB early on and incorporates it throughout the chapters to perform symbolic, graphical, and numerical tasks. The text covers a variety of methods from curve fitting to solving ordinary and partial differential equations.Provides fully worked-out examples showing all detailsConfirms results through the execution of the user-defined function or the script fileExecutes built-in functions for re-confirmation, when availableGenerates plots regularly to shed light on the soundness and significance of the numerical resultsCreated to be user-friendly and easily understandable, Numerical Methods for Engineers and Scientists Using MATLAB provides background material and a broad introduction to the essentials of MATLAB, specifically its use with numerical methods. Building on this foundation, it introduces techniques for solving equations and focuses on curve fitting and interpolation techniques. It addresses numerical differentiation and integration methods, presents numerical methods for solving initial-value and boundary-value problems, and discusses the matrix eigenvalue problem, which entails numerical methods to approximate a few or all eigenvalues of a matrix. The book then deals with the numerical solution of partial differential equations, specifically those that frequently arise in engineering and science. The book presents a user-defined function or a MATLAB script file for each method, followed by at least one fully worked-out example. When available, MATLAB built-in functions are executed for confirmation of the results. A large set of exercises of varying levels of d