BIDDING FOR PARKING: The Impact of University Affiliation on Predicting Bid Values in Dutch Auctions of On-Campus Parking Permits
By Grant Kelly
Parking is often underpriced and expanding its capacity is expensive; universities need a better way of reducing congestion outside of building costly parking garages. Demand based pricing mechanisms, such as auctions, offer a possible solution to the problem by promising to reduce parking at peak times. However, faculty, students, and staff at universities have systematically different parking needs, leading to different parking valuations. In this study, I determine the impact university affiliation has on predicting bid values cast in three Dutch Auctions of on-campus parking permits sold at Chapman University in Fall 2010. Using clustering techniques crosschecked with university demographic information to detect affiliation groups, I ran a log-linear regression, finding that university affiliation had a larger effect on bid amount than on lot location and fraction of auction duration. Generally, faculty were predicted to have higher bids whereas students were predicted to have lower bids.
Advisor: Alison Hagy, Allan Collard-Wexler, Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: C38, C57, D44, R4, R49 | Tagged: Auctions, Parking, University Parking, Bidder Affiliation, Dutch Auction, Clustering
Corporate Financial Distress and Bankruptcy Prediction in North American Construction Industry
By Gang Li
This paper seeks to explore the application of Altman’s bankruptcy prediction model in the construction industry by measuring its percentage accuracy on a dataset consisting of 108 bankrupt & non-bankrupt firms selected across the timeline of 1985-2013. Another main goal this paper is to explore the predictive power of an expanded variable set tailored to the construction industry and compare the results. Specifically, this measuring process is done using machine learning algorithm based on scikit-learn library that transforms a raw .csv file into clean vectorized dataset. The algorithm provides various classifiers to cross-validate the training set, which produces mixed statistics that favors neither variable set but provides insight into the reliability of the non-linear classifiers.
Advisor: Connel Fullenkamp | JEL Codes: C38, C5, G33, G34 | Tagged: Bankruptcy, Corporate, Discriminant Analysis, Distress, Machine Learning
