This paper uses a large panel data set to examine the relation between elections and fiscal policy. We find evidence of political budget cycles in both developed and developing countries: government spending increases before elections while revenues fall, leading to a larger deficit in election years. We demonstrate that political budget cycles are much larger in developing countries than in de...

It has been widely recognized that physical-layer impairments, including power losses, must be taken into account when optical connections are routed in transparent networks. We study the problem of constructing light-trees under optical-layer power budget constraints, with a focus on algorithms that can guarantee a certain level of quality for the signals received by the destination nodes. We ...

In this work, we study multiple item auctions in a setting where items are distinguished by their relative values; any pair of items have the same ratio of values to all buyers. Buyers have additive valuations for multiple items. The application we have in mind is that items are positions in an ad auction, and an item’s value corresponds to its click-through rate. Buyers have various per-click ...

We study a variant of the maximum coverage problem which we label the maximum coverage problem with group budget constraints (MCG). We are given a collection of sets S = {S1, S2, . . . , Sm} where each set Si is a subset of a given ground set X. In the maximum coverage problem the goal is to pick k sets from S to maximize the cardinality of their union. In the MCG problem S is partitioned into ...

How should agents bid in repeated sequential auctions when they are budget constrained? A motivating example is that of sponsored search auctions, where advertisers bid in a sequence of generalized second price (GSP) auctions. These auctions, specifically in the context of sponsored search, have many idiosyncratic features that distinguish them from other models of sequential auctions: First, e...

Copyright: © 2017 INFORMS Abstract. Though the choices of terrorists’ attack targets are vast, their resources are limited. In this paper, a game-theoretical model is proposed to study both the defender’s (government) and the attacker’s (terrorist) expenditures among multiple targets under budget constraints to guide investment in defense. We study how the defender’s and the attacker’s equilibr...

This paper addresses a new challenge in active learning: objects are described in different levels of quality and we can obtain a better version of an object at a given cost. This setting is very useful in robotics, where computing and time resources are limited. We aim to improve and label only a few objects under a given budget in an active learning setting.

This paper models a war of attrition where participants first choose contest investment levels that act as a constraint for how long they can compete. To include a measure of the resource’s transferability to other uses (e.g. other contests), expenditures are a convex combination of investment decisions and their ‘bid’ in the contest. It is shown in the symmetric equilibrium that participants u...

We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be correlated across items and budgets of the same bidder, but is assumed independent across bidders. We target mechanisms that are Bayesian Incentive Compatible, but th...

Classification algorithms often handle large amounts of labeled data. When a label is the result of a very expensive computer experiment (in terms of computational time), sequential selection of samples can be used to limit the overall cost of acquiring the labeled data. This paper outlines the concept of sequential design for classification, and the extension of an existing stateof-the-art res...