Goods are often allocated publically by means of queuing processes in developing countries. In such situations, which group of citizens should a corrupt government official favor? In addition, what should be the basis for this favoritism? To the best of our knowledge, these salient questions...

The first three factors resulting from a principal components analysis of term structure data are in the literature typically interpreted as driving the level, slope and curvature of the term structure. Using slight generalisations of theorems from total positivity, we present sufficient...

In this paper we describe the extreme points of two closely related polytopes that are assigned to a digraph. The first polytope is the set of all sharing vectors (elements from the unit simplex) such that each node gets at least as much as each of its successors. The second one is the set of...

The use of various moving average (MA) rules remains popular with financial market practitioners. These rules have recently become the focus of a number empirical studies, but there have been very few studies of financial market models where some agents employ technical trading rules of the type...

Many economic and social situations can be represented by a digraph. Both axiomatic and iterative methods to determine the strength or power of all the nodes in a digraph have been proposed in the literature. We propose a new method, where the power of a node is determined by both the number of...

We consider cooperative games with transferable utility (TU-games), in which we allow for a social structure on the set of players. The social structure is utilized to refine the core of the game. For every coalition the relative strength of a player within that coalition is induced by the...

In this paper, we consider deterministic (both fluid and discrete) polling systems with <I>N</I> queues with infinite buffers and we show how to compute the best polling sequence (minimizing the average total workload). With two queues, the best polling sequence is always periodic when the system is...</i>

In this paper we study Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems with the restriction that at decision epochs only a finite number of given Markovian decision rules may be applied. The elements of the finite set of allowed decision rules should be mixed to improve the performance. The set of...

A version of the classical secretary problem is studied, in which one is interested in selecting one of the <I>b</I> best out of a group of <I>n</I> differently ranked persons who are presented one by one in a random order. It is assumed that <I>b</I> is bigger than or equal to 1 is a preassigned number. It is...</i></i></i>

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject to uncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...