In many countries, including the US, UK and China, households need to pay additional taxes or fees for their second homes, and some choose to avoid such property taxes through voluntary marriage distortions - e.g., by delaying marriage or by divorce. We develop a novel theoretical framework to...

The software industry is deemed an ideal target for a developing country to integrate into the world information and communications technology (ICT) market. On the one hand the industry is labor intensive, and the developing countries have a large labor surplus; on the other hand, it is a...

In the multiple container loading cost minimization problem (MCLCMP), rectangular boxes of various dimensions are loaded into rectangular containers of various sizes so as to minimize the total shipping cost. The MCLCMP can be naturally modeled as a set cover problem. We generalize the set cover...

The container relocation problem (CRP) is one of the most crucial issues for container terminals. In a single bay, containers belonging to multiple groups should be retrieved by an equipped yard crane in accordance with their retrieval priorities. An operation of the crane can either relocate a...

In the shipping and transportation industry, there are several types of standard containers with different dimensions and different associated costs. In this paper, we examine the multiple container loading cost minimization problem (MCLCMP), where the objective is to load products of various...