South Africa’s rising logistics costs: An uncertain future

Discounting an uncertain future

The objective of this paper is to determine the socially optimal discount rate for public investment projects that entail costs and benefits in the very long run. We suppose that there is an exogenous process for the growth of consumption per capita, which is stochastic. We first evaluate the determinants of the discount rate for a specific horizon when the representative agent has a recursive ...

Rising Legal Costs

A continuing, oft-expressed concern about the legal system, in the English-speaking world at least, is the rising cost of legal services, whether civil or criminal. Given the labour-intensive nature of legal services, this is not surprising to an economist, as we discuss below. In order to be effective, policy must be informed before reforms are considered, lest reforming zeal be dissipated ine...

Rising health care costs.

Robust Wagner–Whitin algorithm with uncertain costs

In real-world applications, costs for products are not deterministic: neither static nor dynamic. They actually tend to be non-stationary and cross-correlated. To overcome this drawback, there have been some efforts by researchers to extend the Wagner–Whitin algorithm to consider stochastic costs. However, they assume that the information of probability density function of random costs exists. ...

Technology Adoption with Uncertain Future Costs and Quality