Risk assessments often encounter extreme settings with very few or no occurrences in reality.Inferences about risk indicators in such settings face the problem of insufficient data.Extreme value theory is particularly well suited for handling this type of problems.This paper uses a multivariate...

This paper generalizes Porter’s notion of the value chain for the analysis of service industries. The generalization entails that the flow and the physical transformation and assembly of goods that are characteristic of manufacturing are generalized into flows and transformation of data and...

Short-term performance of a production management system for make-to-stock factories may be quantified through the service rate per shift; long-term performance through the average monthly work in process (WIP). This may yield, for example, that WIP is minimized, while the probability of the...

This paper addresses a highly challenging scheduling problem in the field of printed circuit board (PCB) assembly systems using Surface Mounting Devices (SMD). After describing some challenging optimization sub-problems relating to the heads of multi-head surface mounting placement machines, we...

In this paper we are especially interested how to optimize the production/inventory control for a manufacturer of sweets, under the following circumstances: short production lead times in combination with an intermittent demand pattern for the so-called B-taste items. As for A-taste items a...

In this paper we discuss a real-life case study in the optimization of the logistics network for the collection of containers from end-of-life vehicle dismantlers in the Netherlands.Advanced planning concepts like dynamic assignment of dismantlers to logistic service providers are analyzed by a...

This paper investigates whether there are country-specific characteristics in goalscoring in the final stage of important international football matches. We examine goal-scoring from 1960 onwards in full `A' international matches of six national teams: Belgium, Brazil, England, Germany, Italy...

We test the effect of players' moods on their behavior in a gift-exchange game.In the first stage of the game, player 1 chooses a transfer to player 2.In the second stage, player 2 chooses an effort level.Higher effort is more costly for player 2, but it increases player 1's payoff.We say that...

We use extreme-value theory to estimate the ultimate world records for the 100m running, for both men and women. For this aim we collected the fastest personal best times set between January 1991 and June 2008. Estimators of the extreme-value index are based on a certain number of upper order...

In many countries, the collective sale of TV rights by sports leagues has been challenged by the antitrust authorities.In several cases, however, leagues won in court, on the ground that sport cannot be considered a standard good.In this paper, we investigate the conditions under which the sale...