The aims and objectives of data mining is to discover actionable knowledge of maininterest to real user needs, which is one of Grand Challenges in KDD. Most extant data miningis a data-driven trial-an-error process. Patterns discovered via predefined models in the aboveprocess are often of...

Motivated by the collection outsourcing phenomena under Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), this paper studies a contract design problem for a manufacturer who consigns the used product collection to a collector, while the manufacturer only has incomplete information on the collector's cost....