Halal certification of financials product may reduce transaction costs for its buyers when it provides a trusted standard for investors that seek to comply with Islamic law. However, we show that in practice it takes considerable amounts of time (20 days) and money (USD 122,000) to obtain a...

There are two important reasons for consumers to spend gift certificates differently than gifts in cash or non-gift income: a) they are forced to change their shopping pattern because of the conditions imposed by the issuer of the certificates, or b) they purposely separate gift certificates...

In 1997 two papers_new applying the metaheuristics Tabu Search (TS) and Heuristic Concentration (HC) tothe p-median problem were published in consecutive volumes of the European Journal of OperationalResearch. Here we apply the method of HC some of the data sets which were used for...

Contemporary financial stochastic programs typically involve a trade-offbetween return and (downside)-risk. Using stochastic programming we characterize analytically (rather than numerically) the optimal decisions that follow from characteristic single-stage and multi-stage versions of such...

In this paper we consider optimization problems defined by a quadraticobjective function and a finite number of quadratic inequality constraints.Given that the objective function is bounded over the feasible set, we presenta comprehensive study of the conditions under which the optimal solution...

In this paper we will describe a Multi-Agent System which iscapable of finding a feasible solution of a specially structuredlinear programming problem. Emphasis is given to correctnessissues and termination detection.