This paper aims at determining the optimal number of new facilities besides specifying both the optimal location and design level of them under the budget constraint in a competitive environment by a novel hybrid continuous and discrete firefly algorithm. A real-world application of locating new chain stores in the city of Tehran, Iran, is used and the results are analyzed. In addition, several...

We consider the problem of budget (or other resource) allocation in sequential decision problems involving a large number of concurrently running sub-processes, whose only interaction is through their gradual consumption of budget (or the resource in question). We use the case of an advertiser interacting with a large population of target customers as a primary motivation. We consider two compl...

The authors are extremely grateful to Jude Hillary and Victoria Mimpriss from HM Treasury, who managed the research project, and to other named and unnamed officials in HM Treasury, the Inland Revenue and the Department for Work and Pensions who gave useful comments at various stages of the project's development. We would also like to thank the participants of the IFS seminar organised in Novem...

We investigate computational and mechanism design aspects of optimal scarce resource allocation, where the primary rationing mechanism is through waiting times. Specifically we consider the problem of allocating medical treatments to a population of patients. Each patient has demand for exactly one unit of treatment, and can choose to be treated in one of k hospitals, H1, . . . ,Hk. Different h...

We analyze the role of government intertemporal budget policies in a growing open economy including nominal assets in the presence of an upward sloping supply of debt. This introduces transitional dynamics that influence the effects of government policy instruments on the long term fiscal liability. In particular, shifts in capital income taxes can lead to dynamic scoring effects through the ev...

Provision of Social Goods and Soft Budget Constraints* by Lars-Hendrik Röller and Zhentang Zhang Firms in socialist and transitional economies are often obliged to provide a social good in addition to a private good, which makes it difficult for a government to commit not to bail out the firm once it is in financial trouble. This creates a soft budget constraint syndrome which causes the firm t...

We investigate computational and mechanism design aspects of optimal scarce resource allocation, where the primary rationing mechanism is through waiting times. Specifically we consider the problem of allocating medical treatments to a population of patients. Each patient has demand for exactly one unit of treatment, and can choose to be treated in one of k hospitals, H1, . . . ,Hk. Different h...

This paper analyzes the role of nominal assets in ranking intertemporal budget policies in a growing open economy. The budget policies are ranked in terms of the public's intertemporal stock of tax liabilities. Our main result is that, in a small open economy, the valuation of private and public assets is in terms of the exogenous foreign price level under purchasing power parity. This constrai...

In this paper we evaluate the sustainability of the current fiscal policy regime in Poland, which has been in place for almost 10 years since the start of the economic reform process. We use the intertemporal budget constraint (IBC) as a framework, and evaluate the sustainability of current policies. Consistency of fiscal policy with the IBC is evaluated using unit root and cointegration tests....

The result of Benhabib, Schmitt-Grohé, and Uribe (2001) is powerful because it relies only on three rather natural conditions: the Fisher equation, the convex Taylor rule, and the lower bound of the nominal interest rate. Their result is striking because the paper reveals the peril of the active Taylor rule, which has been shown to implement the target in a stable manner under various condition...