The old dictum says that if the Devil did not exist, the Church would have had to invent him. Similarly, if the regulator didn't exist, the airline industry would have had to invent him-and did in 1938. A current question is what would happen to the industry were it totally deregulated. One thesis is that there would be a rush by existing and new entrants to those routes thought to be profitabl...

The value of environmental assets such as biodiversity, unique locations and the atmosphere may be hard to quantify. The implications of the irreversibility of decisions to destroy these has been the subject of extensive discussion. We analyze the value of such assets under conditions of uncertainty about future preferences, and show that this uncertainty will imply a conservation motive if it ...

In recent years drug prices have increasingly become a topic of debate for patients, providers, payers and policy makers. To place the current drug price debate into historical context, we searched the New York Times and Wall Street Journal from 1985 - 2015 and found that concerns about drug prices have commonly featured in the press over the study period with recently stronger calls for change...

The directed search model (Peters, 1984) is static; its dynamic extensions typically restrict strategies, often assuming price or match commitments. We lift such restrictions to study equilibrium when search can be directed over time, without constraints and at no cost. In equilibrium trade frictions arise endogenously, and price commitments, if they do exist, are self-enforcing. In contrast to...

Education development is a critical component for a modern economy as the illiteracy rate can hinder economic growth. The illiteracy rate in China has decreased rapidly since 1980s, but there still exists an imbalance in distribution of educational resources among different regions. In order to explore the impacts of education quality on regional economic growth, we employ a quadratic direction...

We address the issue of a tradeoff between longand short-term interests in economic management. Starting with an obvious observation that the actions targeted to longand short-term goals are generally in conflict, we pass on to a less obvious satement that it is not an exceptional situation that a smart decision maker can reduce or even eliminate the conflict. We illustrate the statement by an ...

We analyze a supply chain environment in which a distributor facing price-sensitive demand has the opportunity to contractually commit to a delivery quantity at regular intervals over a finite horizon in exchange for a per-unit cost reduction for units acquired via committed delivery. Supplemental orders needed to meet demand are purchased at an additional unit cost. For normally distributed de...

Six patients received platelet concentrate transfusions from their HLA-identical siblings. Platelet concentrates were administered either fresh, or after being frozen in 10% dimethylsulfoxide, at a slow controlled rate (1 degree C/min) or rapidly (approximately 8 degrees C/min) in the vapor-phase of a liquid nitrogen refrigerator. The median freeze-thaw loss was 13.5%. The mean 1-hr and 20-hr c...

In today’s market, companies tend to develop long-term multiple-generation product strategies instead of releasing consecutive single products to maintain market competitiveness. Even though this strategy affords market vitality, it also can bring about inter-product-line cannibalization. Cannibalization within a multiple-generation product line is a complex problem, and it has seldom been expl...