Pollution emissions impose serious social negative externalities, especially in terms of public health. To reduce pollution emissions cost-effectively, the marginal abatement costs (MACs) of pollution emissions must be determined. Since the industrial sectors are the essential pillars of China's economic growth, as well as leading energy consumers and sulfur dioxide (SO₂) emitters, estimating M...

Background Public district hospitals (PDHs) in Tunisia are not operating at full plant capacity and underutilize their operating budget.   Methods Individual PDHs capacity utilization (CU) is measured for 2000 and 2010 using dual data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach with shadow prices input and output restrictions. The CU is estimated for 101 of 105 PDH in 2000 and 94 of 105 PDH in 2010.   ...

The term ‘bottleneck’ has been extensively used in operations management literature. Management paradigms like the Theory of Constraints focus on the identification and exploitation of bottlenecks. Yet, we show that the term has not been rigorously defined. We provide a classification of bottleneck definitions available in literature and discuss several myths associated with the concept of bott...

We study the capacity allocation problem in service overlay networks (SON)s with state-dependent connection routing based on revenue maximization. We formulate the dimensioning problem as one in profit maximization and propose a novel model with several new features. In particular the proposed methodology employs an efficient approximation for state dependent routing that reduces the cardinalit...

We examine an economy whose consumers have different discount factors for utility, possibly not exponential. We characterize the properties of efficient allocations of resources and of the shadow prices that would decentralize such allocations. We show in particular that the representative agent has a decreasing discount rate when, as is usually posited, all of a group’s members have a constant...

58. Sustainable development goes beyond a static framework of correcting environmental externalities , deficient markets and inadequate property rights. It is very much concerned with the availability of environmental and natural resources in the future. The problem may be particularly acute in developing countries that have high discount rates due to the scarcity of capital and prevalence of p...

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 consider a non-consuming agent interested in the maximization of the long-run growth rate of a wealth process investing either in a money market and in one risky asset following a geometric Brownian motion or in futures following an arithmetic Brownian motion. The agent faces proportional transaction costs, and similarly as in [17] where the case of stock trading is considered, we show how t...