In this century, medical imaging is at the heart of medical practice. Besides providing fast and accurate diagnosis, advances in radiology equipment offer new and previously non-existing options for treatment guidance with quite low morbidity, resulting in the improvement of health outcomes and quality of life for the patients. Although rapid technological development created new medical imagin...

Recent literature on robust mechanism design focuses on detail-free mechanisms to address issues on the restrictive common knowledge assumption. However, most of the existing studies focus on the implementability of an allocation mechanism in a more robust setting, whereas very little is known regarding how these formulations differ from the revenue perspective in the context of optimal mechani...

A problematic feature of the existing empirical literature on the relationship between revenue decentralization (RD) and inflation is the use of inaccurate measures for RD. Using a newly constructed measure for RD that accounts for over-time changes in subnational tax autonomy, this paper finds that RD leads to lower inflation.

The objective of this paper is to present a new formulation for the optimal scheduling of multipurpose batch plants where equipment redesign is considered simultaneously with the scheduling decisions. The equipment redesign is characterized by the implementation of modifications in the existent processing units so as to change their suitability to perform certain tasks, while regarding tasks’ c...

Uptime-guarantee maintenance contracts reflect the obligation of service providers to maintain full functionality of equipment in certain fractions of working time in a period. In this paper, we study the optimal design of uptime-guarantee contracts for a service provider who does not know the customer’s exact valuation for having the equipment up and running per unit of working time. We first ...

Two complementary wireless networking standards, Bluetooth and 802.11b, operate in the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band. Although they use different methods to modulate and transmit data, significant interference can occur. Under certain conditions, a Bluetooth-enabled device can render an 802.11b connection almost useless. This paper presents measurement results from a st...

Tubercle bacilli die much more rapidly under anaerobic than under aerobic conditions. Anaerobically, the rate of death is accelerated by increased CO(2) pressure, and when certain metabolites (lactate for example) are present in the medium. Death of the bacilli under certain conditions of anaerobiosis is accompanied by loss of ability to take the acid-fast stain and by progressive cellular disi...