The arrival of digital commerce has lead to an increasing use of personalization and differentiation strategies. With differentiated products along the quality dimension and/or the quantity dimension comes the need for nonlinear pricing policies or second degree price discrimination. The optimal pricing strategies for quality and quantity differentiated products were first investigated by Mussa and Rosen (1978) and Maskin and Riley (1984), respectively. The optimal pricing strategies were shown to depend heavily on the prior distribution of the private information regarding the types, and ultimately the willingness-to-pay of the buyers. Yet, frequently the sellers possess only weak and incomplete information about the distribution of demand. This paper aims to develop robust pricing policies that are independent of specific demand distributions and provide revenue guarantees across all possible distributions.

One of the largest barriers to learning programming is the precise and complex syntax required to write programs. This barrier is a key impediment to the integration of programming into the core curriculum of general high school science courses – there is not enough time to learn both syntax and programming in a threeweek course module. The newly developed “Iconic Programmer” allows executable programs to be written through mouse clicks and menus, includes symbol by symbol translation into Java and Turing, and comes complete with a three-week lesson plan suitable to new programmers. To date, the new tool has been used effectively with full-semester, introductory programming courses at both the university and high school level.

This paper describes the incorporation of an advanced software product into the framework of an existing automated design system. A discussion of the merits and challenges of this undertaking is included. The merits of the MERLYN-G gate array router will be covered in detail, along with the algorithms which contribute to making it a powerful semicustom tool.