When the seats in a parliamentary body are to be allocated proportionally to some given weights, such as vote counts or population data, divisor methods form a prime class to carry out the apportionment. We present a new characterization of divisor methods, via primal and dual optimization problems. The primal goal function is a cumulative product of the discontinuity points of the rounding rul...

This paper intends to estimate the potential impact of climate change on Taiwan’s agricultural sector. Yield response regression models are used to investigate the climate change’s impact on 60 crops. A price-endogenous mathematical programming model is then used to simulate the welfare impacts of yield changes under various climate change scenarios. Results suggest that both warming and climat...

When an irreversible decision is taken under uncertainty there is an option value of delay. If a small number of agents are in competition each one’s ability to delay is restricted by the fear of preemption, seeming to undermine the real options approach. We present a model in which two firms may invest in competing research projects with uncertain returns. Two distinct types of equilibria aris...

This paper studies the aggregate dynamics of durable and nondurable consumption under slow information diffusion (SID) due to noisy observations and learning within the permanent income framework. We show that SID can significantly improve the model’s predictions on the joint behavior of income, durable consumption, and nondurable consumption at the aggregate level. Specifically, we find that S...

Robust portfolio optimization has been developed to resolve the high sensitivity to inputs of the Markowitz mean-variance model. Although much effort has been put into forming robust portfolios, there have not been many attempts to analyze the characteristics of portfolios formed from robust optimization. We investigate the behavior of robust portfolios by analytically describing how robustness...

When firms make a decision about irreversible investment, they may not have complete confidence about their perceived probabilitymeasure describing future uncertainty. Theymay think other probabilitymeasures perturbed from the original one are also possible. Such uncertainty, characterized by not a single probability measure but a set of probability measures, is called “Knightian uncertainty.” ...

We endogenize the discount rate via a broad measure of wealth and provide empirical evidence that wealth affects the discount rate negatively. We demonstrate that the Pontryagin conditions require positive felicity for intuitive results, whereas the concavity of the Hamiltonian requires negative felicity for optimality. This dilemma also holds for the endogenizations of Obstfeld (1990) and foll...

In this paper we argue that in realistically calibrated two period general equilibrium models with incomplete markets CAPM-pricing provides a good benchmark for equilibrium prices even when agents are not mean-variance optimizers and returns are not normally distributed. We numerically approximate equilibria for a variety of di erent speci cations for preferences, endowments and dividends and c...

A visible light communication (VLC) system using an organic bulk heterojunction photodetector (OPD) is presented. The system has been successfully proven indoors with an audio signal. The emitter consists of three commercial high-power white LEDs connected in parallel. The receiver is based on an organic photodetector having as active layer a blend of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and phenyl C6...

Hybrid inorganic–organic solar cells typically combine a transition metal oxide and organic absorber to form the donor–acceptor pair. Here, we explore the use of a rare earth oxide to function as the inorganic component of a hybrid solar cell. Oxidized neodymium (Nd2O3) particles are combined with [6,6]-phenyl C61 butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) to form the solar cell active layer. The short c...