A game of simultaneous free entry and sequential output choices is analyzed. Firms enter simultaneously in stage 1 by paying a fixed cost, and they choose output levels sequentially in subsequent stages. At the subgame-perfect equilibrium of the game, the production level of a firm is decreasing with the order of the firm in the decision-making. The firm that is the last to choose output produc...

In this paper we discuss the problem of synchronization in ZooKeeper, a fault-tolerant distributed coordination framework. One of the key features of ZooKeeper is to move away from blocking API such as locks, in order to avoid problems with slow or faulty clients. Instead, it provides an event like synchronization mechanism, allowing clients to be notified upon state change on the server. Howev...

The Medicare prospective payment system (PPS) contains incentives for hospitals to improve efficiency by placing them at financial risk to earn a positive margin on services rendered to Medicare patients. Concerns about the financial viability of small rural hospitals led to the implementation of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility Program (Flex Program) of 1997, which allows facilities des...

Abstract We investigate the impact of five types subsidies granted under European Union Common Agricultural Policy on persistent and transient inefficiency Polish dairy farms. Our research shows that coupled environmental reduce technical inefficiency, while opposite is true for Less Favoured Areas (LFA) other rural subsidies. Simultaneously, environmental, LFA, increase inefficiency. These res...

Insulator icing endangers the safe operation of overhead power lines. The current measures for image monitoring lines rely on manual observation. There is an urgent need intelligent analysis methods with strong generalisation, accuracy, and efficiency to improve grid decision-making. Based data from China Southern Power Grid, this paper first proposes rules insulator cleaning, classification, a...

Subsidies are considered important means to facilitate the provision of public transit, yet the empirical evidence implies that they can have harming effects on costs and possibly also on operators’ performance. This paper examines the impacts of deficit-balancing subsidies on the cost inefficiency of local public bus companies in Germany, where a complex system allocates ample financial suppor...

The price of anarchy is by now a standard measure for quantifying the inefficiency introduced in games due to selfish behavior, and is defined as the ratio between the optimal outcome and the worst Nash equilibrium. However, the price of anarchy is not even defined in games that admit no Nash equilibrium. We propose the dynamic inefficiency measure, which quantifies the average inefficiency int...