In recent years a number of market participants called into question the efficiency of the price discoverymechanism in commodity futures markets. They believe that speculators move commodity futures marketsaway from their fundamentals by distorting prices and exacerbating volatility. The smoking...

Economics is viewed as a discipline that is mainly concerned with 'simplistic' theorizing, centered upon constrained optimization. As such, it is ahistorical and outcome focused, ie, it does not deal with economic processes. It is argued that all parts of the economy are inhabited by complex...

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) aims at gaining useful information quickly from large amounts of data residing in a data warehouse. To improve the quickness of response to queries, pre-aggregation is a useful strategy. However, it is usually impossible to pre-aggregate along all...

We consider the problem of allocating a single server to a system of queues with Poisson arrivals. Each queue represents a class of jobs and possesses a holding cost rate, general service distribution, and a set-up cost. The objective is to minimize the expected cost due to the waiting of jobs...

We consider a two-station tandem queueing system where customers arrive according to a Poisson process and must receive service at both stations before leaving the system. Neither queue is equipped with dedicated servers. Instead, we consider three scenarios for the fluctuations of workforce...