Biodiversity prospecting refers to the exploration of the commercial value of genetic and biochemical resources. In this chapter, we study a drug producing pharmaceutical firm (PF) that searches for potentially useful chemicals made by wild organisms in a conservation area. This PF is able to...

Biodiversity prospecting refers to the exploration of the commercial value of genetic and biochemical resources. In this chapter, we study a drug producing pharmaceutical firm (PF) that searches for potentially useful chemicals made by wild organisms in a conservation area. This PF is able to...

Goods for which demand greatly exceeds supply are frequently allocated to citizens using queuing mechanisms. However, violence can occur either when queues are very long or when large numbers of citizens are not provided goods being allocated with queuing mechanisms. Hence, we use the theory of...

The process of environmental regulation is usually a two-step one. In the first step, a standard for environmental quality is set. Then, in the second step, a regulatory mechanism is put in place to achieve the standard. In this paper I show how renewal theory can be used to set the quality...

A number of ecologists and some economists have commented on the significance of persistence as a stability concept for jointly determined ecological-economic systems. This notwithstanding, the economics and the regional science literatures have paid scant attention to the problem of computing...

The aim of this paper is to analytically review the contemporary scientific literature in range management. To this end, we first focus on the ecology and the management of rangelands. Second, we concentrate on the economics and the management of rangelands. Third, we shed light on significant...

Recently, Batabyal (1998) has analyzed the nature of the decision making process in arranged marriages. Specifically, he has shown that a marrying agent's optimal policy depends only on the properties of the current marriage proposal, independent of whether there is recall of earlier marriage...

We study the provision of information to tourists in a probabilistic setting. Specifically, we provide answers to three hitherto unstudied questions in the tourism literature. We first delineate a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) model of a tourist information center (TIC) and then we compute...

Our primary objective in this note is to show how useful the theory of discrete-time Markov chains (DTMCs) is in helping model and understand the little studied but salient problem of the provision of off-peak season guided tours to tourists. To this end, we first delineate a DTMC model that...

We study two approaches to the optimal provision of guided tours to tourists by a firm during the slack season. In the “scheduling by numbers” approach, our firm focuses on the number of tourists who must be in our firm’s premises before this firm begins to use the tour guide to provide...