Private sector research and development (R&D) in food processing has seen a growing share of agricultural R&D. This paper analyzes market and technological links between farmer-entrepreneurs and food processing firms. It is shown that processing sector R&D tends to display explosive cycles. To avoid explosive cycles, the processing sector sets the R&D growth path and its target. Dynamic adjustm...

This study examines the effect of banning antimicrobial growth promoters on efficiency in the production of weaned and slaughter (finishing) pigs. We focus on the reaction of producers and production efficiency. We evaluate the estimated output and input shadow prices relative to market prices to analyse producer reactions and capture the impact on production efficiency by evaluating the effect...

The paper highlights the importance of design in product innovation, using portable computers as an empirical case study. This is an attempt to redress the balance in the innovation and product technology literature, which has overwhelmingly focused on hardware technologies (technical characteristics) of products. Principal components analysis is used to identify clusters of design characterist...

We consider the problem of designing an efficient liver allocation system for allocating donated organs to patients waiting for transplantation, the only viable treatment for end-stage liver disease. Given the scarcity of available organs relative to the number of patients waiting for transplantation, we model the system as a multiclass fluid model of overloaded queues, which captures the disea...

In frictionless markets, utility maximization problems are typically solved either by stochastic control or by martingale methods. Beginning with the seminal paper of Davis and Norman [Math. Oper. Res. 15 (1990) 676–713], stochastic control theory has also been used to solve various problems of this type in the presence of proportional transaction costs. Martingale methods, on the other hand, h...

S risk refers to the risk of collapse of an entire complex system as a result of the actions taken by the individual component entities or agents that comprise the system. Systemic risk is an issue of great concern in modern financial markets as well as, more broadly, in the management of complex business and engineering systems. We propose an axiomatic framework for the measurement and managem...

This thesis deals with rational investors who maximize their expected utility in incomplete markets. In Part I, we consider models where incompleteness is induced by jumps and stochastic volatility. Using martingale methods we determine optimal investment strategies for power utility in a wide class of different models. Moreover, we show how first-order approximations of utility-based prices an...

This paper considers optimal staffing in service centers. We construct models for profit and cost centers using dynamic rate queues. To allow for practical optimal controls, we approximate the queueing process using a Gaussian random variable with equal mean and variance. We then appeal to the Pontryagin’s maximum principle to derive a closed form square root staffing (SRS) rule for optimal sta...

This study investigates the water demand of Indian manufacturing plants. It adopts an input distance function approach and approximates it by a translog form. Duality between cost function and input distance function is exploited to retrieve information concerning substitutability and the shadow price of water. The model is estimated, using linear programming approach, on a sample of 92 firms o...

in some situations the producers desire to maximize total profit of decision making units (dmus) while the inputs and outputs prices of dmus change from one time period to another. in this paper, the researchers develop productivity index when producers are going to maximize total profit when the price of inputs and outputs are known.the proposed method uses all price information about inputs a...