Most terrestrial biological invasions occur in landscapes comprising numerous, independently managed properties. Thus, control of invasion spread generally depends on the choices of many managers, each deciding the extent to control invasions on their property. Here we develop a...

Traditional surplus production models are based on restrictive assumptions of fish population dynamics and distribution, fish catch, and fishing effort, and can provide misleading guidelines for fisheries management. Following a review of two conventional models and later contributions, this...

This review discusses bioeconomic models of the forest and uses them to explore policy options for forest management. The main type of bioeconomic model used is based on a biomass model of the growth of the forest, similar to the biomass model widely used in fishery economics. However a more...

The direct and indirect costs of suspected human rabies exposure were estimated for San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, California, USA. Clinic, hospital, and county public health records (1998-2002) were examined to determine direct costs for postexposure prophylaxis (PEP), and 55 (41%)...

Multiple sectors within U.S. crop industries - - -growers, elevators, handlers/shell- ers, processors, distributors, and consumers - - -are affected by aflatoxin contamination of commodities, and have the potential to control it using methods developed at both the pre- and postharvest levels....

Gradient-based approaches to direct policy search in reinforcement learning have received much recent attention as a means to solve problems of partial observability and to avoid some of the problems associated with policy degradation in value-function methods. In this paper we introduce GPOMDP,...

There are two important rules in a patent race: what an innovator must accomplish to receive the patent and the allocation of the benefits that flow from the innovation. Most patent races end before R&D is completed and the prize to the innovator is often less than the social benefit of the...

There exist many opportunities for deploying autonomic computing in an IT environment. The highest-value opportunities are going to be where we can reduce human decision-making complexity for systems administrators. To identify these opportunities, we need a model of decision complexity for...

A credit derivative is a financial instrument whose value depends on the credit risk of an underlying asset or assets. Credit risk is the possibility that the obligor fails to honor any payment obligation. This thesis proposes four new computational methods for the valuation of credit...

We propose a new numerical method to solve stochastic models that combines the parameterized expectations (PEA) and the Smolyak algorithms. This method is especially convenient to address problems with occasionally binding constraints (a feature inherited from PEA) and/or a large number of state...