Abstract
Prosumers can organize themselves in collective self-consumption (CSC) structures and renewable energy communities (RECs) to share energy they produce locally. In addition, through their contracted balancing responsible party (BRP), i.e., retailer and aggregator, they could become flexibility providers for system services to solve, for example, local grid constraints. Since CSC and REC structures are progressively being regulated in many countries, local energy markets (LEMs) and local flexibility markets (LFMs) to be developed with these structures should find the way to comply with existing CSC rules to settle energy transactions and flexibility activation, both, locally and with the wholesale markets (WSMs) settlement, and the existing barriers and regulatory improvements should be identified to allow future implementations. Indeed, the integration of local and WSMs is still a matter of development, demanding innovative solutions, one of the main issues being, for example, the impact of the flexibility activation by one BRP into another BRP's expected delivery commitment in the WSM. This work proposes innovative designs for LEM and LFM based on common CSC rules of existing regulations, and a conceptual approach to integrate them together and with the WSM balancing responsibilities of the BRPs involved, identifying existing regulatory barriers. While many LEMs in the literature operate as WSMs, with future markets and delivery commitments for prosumers, we propose the use of a post-delivery LEM that can be cleared even after the delivery of energy, which strongly simplifies prosumers participation avoiding the need of these a priori unrealistic commitments. The business model, the main roles involved, and the contractual framework to connect the BRPs while allowing prosumers to freely contract the BRP of their choice for both energy supply and flexibility provision are described and can serve as a guide for future regulatory improvement of the common regulatory frameworks.

Abstract
Sponsored advertising on search engines is one of the fastest growing online advertising marketplaces. The space available for paid ads, or positions, is sold using auctions and payment is calculated considering the number of clicks each position receives. Two mechanisms are generally used in position auctions: Generalized Second Price (GSP) (e.g. Google, Yahoo!) and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) (e.g. Facebook). To understand which mechanism guarantees the highest payoff to market players (search engines and advertisers), a multi-agent simulation is developed in Netlogo. Using the generated data, a supervised learning-based analysis on search engines and bidders' payoffs is made using linear regression models and regression trees. Results suggest that the average payoff for auctioneers (the search engines) and bidders (the advertisers), the price for each position, and first bidder's payment, are significantly different in the GSP and VCG mechanisms. We also found the mechanism that generates the highest payoff for the search engine is the VCG, while for the bidders it is the GSP.

Abstract
The Transmission System Operators (TSOs) from Portugal and Spain do not procure Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR) through market mechanisms. A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) aggregating sources such as wind and solar power and hydrogen electrolysers (HEs) would benefit from participation in this ancillary service market. The methodology proposed in this paper allows to quantify the costs of the participation of the Iberian TSOs in the FCR Cooperation as well as the revenues of a VPP that aggregates wind and solar power and HEs. Results are produced using real data from past market sessions. The Portuguese TSO would have paid roughly 10 M€ to participate in this market in 2022. Using data for the same country and year, a VPP (aggregating the HEs expected to be connected by 2025) would have revenues over 2 M€. © 2023 IEEE.

Abstract
The world of video games has more and more users, and today it is considered as an alternative to the existing reality. Online games like Second Life have independent economies with independent businesses and there is a growing interest to create rich experiences with high levels of presence, to create an alternative to reality, where you can work, be with friends, socialize and much more. With this new era that could be true virtual reality, and with advertising agents always trying to innovate the way they convey their advertising messages, it will be necessary to keep up with the medium to also reach new consumers. This integration of advertising in video games is not recent, however, and the practice itself has become increasingly popular in sports games, car racing games and many others that already have the presence of brands and advertising messages. This study intends to work as an introductory study to the theme, proposing some questions regarding the influence of the way advertising is inserted in the game. In this sense, an initial descriptive investigation of acquired data was developed, using a game created on the Unity platform, specifically for this research. The game was developed in 3 different versions, in which each one integrates advertising messages in a distinct way. Subsequently, a questionnaire survey was conducted to assess the respondents' opinion about the game, the effectiveness of advertising and the players' opinion regarding the practice of inserting advertising in video games. The influence and effectiveness of in-game advertising was also analyzed in order and to acquire their opinion regarding the practice used. The descriptive research indicates preliminarily that the way advertising is integrated may influence the effectiveness of in-game advertising. It was also possible to perceive that although the opinion is generally neutral, the respondents that have as a habitual leisure activity the consumption of videogames have a higher retention to in-game advertising when compared with non-gamers. At the end of this study, proposals and recommendations for future research involving this theme are presented. © ICWI 2023.All rights reserved.

Abstract
Agricultural cooperatives remain a significant component of the food and agriculture industry to help the stakeholders to provide services and have opportunities for themselves. One of the aims of an agricultural cooperative is to answer to the needs within the communities of the farmers. Agricultural cooperatives enable individual farmers to increase productivity and maximise their social welfare. Together the farmer members of an agricultural cooperative can buy input supplies cheaper and sell more of their products in larger markets at higher prices, which is not possible for an individual smallholder farmer otherwise. Some studies have shown that farmers who were members of cooperatives have gained higher revenue for their products and spent less on input. However, organising the hundreds of farmers into smaller groups to perform collective farming and marketing is crucial to strengthening their position in the food and agriculture industry. Thereby, in our work, we consider an agricultural cooperative of smallholder farmers as a multi-agent based coalitional model, where coalitions are formed based on the similarity among the smallholder farmers. In this paper, we propose a model and implement a heuristic-based algorithm to find the disjoint partition of the agents set. We evaluate the model and the algorithm based on the following criteria: (i) individual gain, (ii) runtime analysis, (iii) solution quality, and (iv) scalability. We theoretically prove that our coalitional model of an agricultural cooperative has conciseness, expressiveness and efficiency properties. Experimental results confirm that our algorithm is time efficient and scalable. We show, both empirically and theoretically, that our algorithm generates a solution within a bound of the optimal solution. We also show that our coalition model generates positive revenue for the smallholder farmers and the payoff division rule is individual rational. In addition, we generate a new dataset in the context of an agricultural cooperative to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed coalitional model of the cooperative.

Abstract