Transcribing medical documents accurately into pre-defined formats and within certain time frames is vital for administrative and medical purposes in any hospital. This paper describes quantitative models incorporating available data to represent transcription activities of a medical records...

Struggling retail chains often try to recover profitability by closing some of their stores. The challenge in this strategy lies in determining how many stores to close, as store exit has implications for both the customers and the supply chain. After a store closes, its customers are lost...

Nitrate pollution from agriculture is an important environmental problem, caused bythe excessive use of inorganic fertilizers. The internalization of this externality, via a tax onmineral nitrogen, could lead to a second best solution, reducing nitrate emissions. Severalauthors suggest that a...

Recently, Branzei, Dimitrov, and Tijs (2003) introduced cooperative interval-valued games. Among other insights, the notion of an interval core has been coined and proposed as a solution concept for interval-valued games. In this paper we will present a general mathematical programming algorithm...

We analyze the current state and future requirements of an agricultural income stabilization mechanism in a transition country – namely, the crop insurance system in Kazakhstan. Three objectives will be pursued: First, factors influencing the development of the crop insurance market will be...

A mathematical programming model is developed and associated to a spatial pattern index (Ripley L function) to analyse the optimal reserve design and implementation for the Little Bustard conservation in Plaine de Niort. The model structure corresponds to three spatial levels, fields, farm and...

The biological nature of agricultural production processes induce a higher degree ofuncertainty surrounding the economic performance of farm enterprises. This has contributedto the development and acceptance of forms of public intervention aimed at reducing incomevariability that have no...

As networks improve and new services emerge, questions arise that affect service deployments and network choices. The Internet is arguably a successful example of a network shared by many services. However, combining heterogeneous services on the same network need not always be the right answer,...

This dissertation contains three essays that can be read independently. The first chapter examines how a debt crisis can occur and persist as a result of unanticipated, transitory, real interest rate and commodity price shocks. Using an optimal stopping framework, the debtor country's optimal...