Many authors have studied repairable redundant system operating in different condition under the assumption that the system received corrective maintenance at failure and preventive maintenance before failure. However, little or no attention is paid on whether the system can receive minor and major maintenance when it is operating in a reduced capacity state. In this study we consider a redunda...

Emanuel and Miller argue that “by themselves the payment and profit status of [TeGenero] do not make the [TGN1412] trail ethically suspect” (2007, 76). I think that they are right to argue that there is nothing necessarily incriminating about for-profit companies conducting medical research, but that this conclusion is irrelevant to the moral status of incentives in the TeGenero trial. Not only...

Consider trade conducted via a platform, such as an online app store or a farmers market. The quality sellers choose for their products affects the surplus trade generates. Because the platform’s profit depends on that surplus, the platform can have an incentive to regulate quality. This is true even if quality is observable at time of purchase or if sellers can develop reputations concerning q...

Fixed charge solid transportation problems are formulated as profit maximization problems under a budget constraint at each destination. Here item is purchased in different depots at different prices. Accordingly the item is transported to different destinations from different depots using different vehicles. Unitsare sold from different destinations to the customers at different selling prices...

Objectives: Illicit drug abuse and drug-related crimes are still a growing problem worldwide. Understanding the increasing number of individuals arrested for drug charges, as well as their characteristics is necessary to predict and establish preventive and treatment programs. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in Shahroud, Northeast of Iran from 2015 to 2018. Data were collecte...

The Affordable Care Act's medical loss ratio (MLR) regulation requires insurers to spend 80 percent or 85 percent of premiums on medical claims and quality improvements. In 2011, insurers falling below this minimum paid more than $1 billion in rebates. This brief examines how insurers spend their premium dollars--particularly their investment in quality improvement activities--focusing on diffe...

We studied a class of Service Overlay Network (SON) capacity allocation problem with Grade of Service (GoS) constraints. Similar problems in the literature are typically formulated as either a Maximum Profit (MP) optimization problem or a Minimum Cost (MC) optimization problem. In this article we investigate the relationship between the MP and MC formulations. When the service charges are zero,...

Despite intense price competition firms obfuscate product information when it is relatively costless to reveal, contrary to neoclassical predictions. This paper considers whether firms can profitably conceal (part of) their prices for a homogeneous product when consumers differ in their ability to form expectations of market prices. The model shows that the ability to conceal prices but still a...

Internet users have suffered collateral damage in tussles over paid peering between large ISPs and content providers. Paid is a relationship where two networks exchange traffic with payment, which provides direct access to each other’s customers without having pay third party carry that for them. The issue will arise again when the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considers...

ABSTRACT Developments in meteorology over the last couple of decades have enabled significant improvements to be made in the accuracy of seasonal forecasts. This paper focuses on developing a model for cash crop planning that utilises these forecasts. It does this by determining the rate of growth of each crop as a function of heat units accumulated. This enables time to maturity to be determin...