Breakdowns

Breakdowns ∗ Godfrey Keller

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we find that the cooperative value function does not exhibit smooth pasting at the efficient cut-off beli...

Constitutions and Democratic Breakdowns

Scheduling with Unexpected Machine Breakdowns

We investigate an online version of a basic scheduling problem where a set of jobs has to be scheduled on a number of identical machines so as to minimize the makespan. The job processing times are known in advance and preemption of jobs is allowed. Machines are non-continuously available, i.e., they can break down and recover at arbitrary time instances not known in advance. New machines may b...

Information Breakdowns in Usability Engineering

Usability engineering is the process of involving users throughout the development cycle to produce user-centric, easy to use software. The process model of involving users throughout this cycle is called user-centered design. Although a logical and proven model, the success of this process is often impeded by poor transference of knowledge between usability engineers, interaction designers, an...

Detecting and Predicting Forecast Breakdowns

We propose a theoretical framework for detecting and predicting forecast breakdowns, defined as situations where the out-of-sample performance of a forecast method, judged by some loss function, is systematically worse than its in-sample performance. Our framework can be used to establish the robustness of a forecast method in the past, and to predict whether the forecast method will break down...