The lasso and its variants have attracted much attention recently because of its ability of simultaneous estimation and variable selection. When some prior knowledge exists in applications, the performance of estimation and variable selection can be further improved by incorporating the prior...

Professional economists rarely write on questions of genocide. This surprises because a workhorse tool of the economics discipline concerns the analysis of behavior that takes place under constraints. All parties in genocide—perpetrators, victims, and third parties—face cost and resource...

The paper identifies a necessary and sufficient condition for a deterministic local optimum to be locally improved upon by a stochastic deviation. When this condition is satisfied, a method to construct the stochastic allocations that increase the objective is provided. This technique is applied...

Choice-based conjoint analysis is a popular marketing research technique to learn about consumers' preferences and to make market share forecasts under various scenarios for product offerings. Managers expect these forecasts to be “realistic” in terms of being able to replicate market shares...

Service systems are people-centric. The service providers employ a large workforce to service many clients, aiming to meet the service-level agreements (SLAs) and deliver a satisfactory client experience. A challenge is that the volumes of service requests change dynamically and the types of...

The standard neoclassical approach to economic theorising excludes, by definition, economic emergence and the related phenomenon of entrepreneurship. We explore how the most economic of human behaviours, entrepreneurship, came to be largely excluded from mainstream economic theory. In contrast,...

Constrained optimization is an important research topic that assists in quality planning and decision making. To solve such problems, one of the important aspects is to improve upon any constraint violation, and thus bring infeasible individuals to the feasible region. To achieve this goal,...