The present paper develops a basic framework for evaluating and optimizing profits in a business operation. In developing a business we are often faced with an infinity of choices ranging from what products or services to sell and what customers to target to how to structure and manage the...

This paper contains a model of waste elimination through design. It argues for the importance of managing design complexity in improving cost, quality, variety, and time--to--market performance variables. Management of design complexity is identified with creation, choice, and application of...

This paper contains a model of waste elimination through design. It argues for the importance of managing design complexity in improving cost, quality, variety, and time--to--market performance variables. Management of design complexity is identified with creation, choice, and application of...

This paper aims at estimating the effect on achievement of various types of schools: private, private but government-dependent and public ones. It is based on the analysis of Reading test scores of 15-year-old students surveyed in 2002 across OECD and non-OECD countries. The estimation of the...

This paper considers an economy where groups compete in a contest for power to redistribute future income in their favor. An increased external threat of terrorism--either an increase in the likelihood of a successful terrorist attack or a greater loss of income in the event of a successful...

This paper develops a positive analysis of alliance formation that builds on a simple economic model featuring a “winner-take-all” contest for control of some resource. When an alliance forms, members pool their efforts in that contest and,if successful, apply the resource to a joint...

This paper analyzes the effects of anticipated inflation on the resource allocations between production and financial services. We develop a model with heterogeneous workers and two sectors economy. A manufacturing sector producing a final composite good and a financial sector providing monetary...

We present the Progressive Second Price auction, a new decentralized mechanism for allocation of variable-size shares of a resource among multiple users. Unlike most mechanisms in the economics litterature, PSP is designed with a very small message space, making it suitable for real-time market...

This paper aims at estimating the effect on achievement of various types of schools: private, private but government-dependent and public ones. It is based on the analysis of Math, Science and Reading test scores of 15 year-olds students surveyed in 2002 across OECD and non-OECD countries. The...

The paper develops a Romer-type growth model with a research sector, a manufacturing sector, and a financial sector and shows that inflation has an adverse effect on economic growth. Higher inflation increases the incentives for agents to use money substitutes through financial services in an...