This paper studies business hour decisions by retail chains and corner shops in a spatial retail market. We use a Salop-type model where retailers compete in prices and shopping hours. Assuming equally efficient firms, we find that the corner shop chooses no shorter business hours than a retail chain, but potentially longer ones. Additionally, we find that the firms have different stands toward...

Real Wage Cyclicality in Germany and the UK: New Results Using Panel Data This paper compares the cyclical behaviour of male real wages in Germany and the UK using the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984-2002 and the British Household Panel Survey 1991-2004. We distinguish between job stayers (remaining in the same job), and withinand between-company job movers. Stayers are the large majority in b...

We present economically augmented job shop scheduling (EJSP) as an example of a coordination problem among selfinterested agents with private information. We discuss its significance in modern organizational supply-web structures, analyze its complexity and present a specific type of combinatorial auctions as a solution mechanism. We relate EJSP to results from the area of economic mechanism de...

In this paper we deal with a variant of the Job Shop Scheduling Problem. We consider the addition of release dates and deadlines to be met by all jobs. The objective is makespan minimization if there are no tardy jobs, and tardiness minimization otherwise. The problem is approached by using a Shifting Bottleneck strategy. The presence of deadlines motivates an iterative use of a particular one ...

The Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSP) is one of the most general and difficult of all traditional scheduling problems. The Flexible Job Shop Problem (FJSP) is an extension of the classical job shop scheduling problem which allows an operation to be processed by any machine from a given set. The problem is to assign each operation to a machine and to order the operations on the machine...

In this paper, we propose 260 scheduling problems whose size is greater than that of the rare examples published. Such sizes correspond to real dimensions of industrial problems. The types of problems that we propose are : the permutation flow shop, the job shop and the open shop scheduling problems. We restrict us to basic problems : the processing times are fixed, there are neither set-up tim...

The paper considers a three-machine shop scheduling problem to minimize the makespan, in which the route of a job should be feasible with respect to a machine precedence digraph with three nodes and one arc. For this NP-hard problem that is related to the classical flow shop and open shop models, we present a simple 1.5approximation algorithm and an improved 1.4-approximation algorithm.

Genetic algorithms are a very popular heuristic which have been successfully applied to many optimization problems within the last 30 years. In this chapter, we give a survey on some genetic algorithms for shop scheduling problems. In a shop scheduling problem, a set of jobs has to be processed on a set of machines such that a specific optimization criterion is satisfied. According to the restr...