We study social learning in a social network setting where agents receive independent noisy signals about the truth. Agents naïvely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. The weights are fixed in the sense of representing average frequency and intensity of...

Structural properties of generalised semi-Markov processes (GSMP) have been successfully studied in the literature. Examples are the celebrated commuting condition (CC), which is the key condition for unbiasedness of the infinitesimal perturbation analysis (IPA) gradient estimator, or the...

In this paper we study a challenging call center operation problem. The goal of our analysis is to identify an optimal policy for allocating tasks to agents. As a first step, we discuss promising randomized policies and use stochastic approximation for finding the optimal randomized policy when...

This paper deals with a system where batch arrivals wait in a station until a server (a train) is available, at which moment it services all customers in waiting. This is an example of a bulk server, which has many applications in public transportation, telecommunications, computer resource...