Miracles, Scarce Resources, and Fairness

Translating with Scarce Resources

Current corpus-based machine translation techniques do not work very well when given scarce linguistic resources. To examine the gap between human and machine translators, we created an experiment in which human beings were asked to translate an unknown language into English on the sole basis of a very small bilingual text. Participants performed quite well, and debriefings revealed a number of...

Competition for Scarce Resources

We show that the efficient allocation of production capacity can turn a competitive industry and downstream market into an imperfectly competitive one. Even though downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, the downstream industry structure will be symmetric only if capacity is sufficiently scarce. Otherwise it will be asymmetric, with one large “fat” capacityhoarding firm and a f...

Competition for Scarce Resources∗

We show that the efficient allocation of production capacity can turn a competitive industry and downstream market into an imperfectly competitive one. Even though downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, the downstream industry structure will be symmetric only if capacity is sufficiently scarce. Otherwise it will be asymmetric, with one large “fat” capacity-hoarding firm and a ...

Managing Scarce Water Resources – China

Fairness, Resources, and Separation

Fair interleaving plays a fundamental rôle in denotational semantic models for shared-memory parallel programs, beginning with Park’s trace semantics, based on a fairmerge relation designed so that (α, β, γ) ∈ fairmerge if and only if γ can be obtained by interleaving α and β. Park’s formulation of fairmerge used nested greatest and least fixed points of monotone functions over traces, but he r...