A longstanding controversy in philosophy is whether decision-making is governed by reason or emotion. I study the role of physiological responses in the decision-making process within the realm of financial markets, where both the environment and decisions-trades-are measurable. In an experiment...

This thesis addresses a problem at the nexus of engineering, computer science, and economics: in large scale, decentralized systems, how can we efficiently allocate scarce resources among competing interests? On one hand, constraints are imposed on the system designer by the inherent...

There is an increasing trend toward massive, geographically distributed systems. The largest Internet companies operate hundreds of thousands of servers in multiple geographic locations, and are growing at a fast clip. A single system's servers and data centers can consume many megawatts of...