I. Introduction: On many occasions we need to construct an index that represents a number of variables (indicators). Cost of living index, general price index, human development index, index of level of development, etc are some of the examples that are constructed by a weighted (linear) aggregation of a host of variables. The general formula of construction of such an index (OECD, 2003) may be...

We present a branch-and-price framework for solving the graph multicoloring problem. We propose column generation to implicitly optimize the linear programming relaxation of an independent set formulation (where there is one variable for each independent set in the graph) for graph multi-coloring. This approach, while requiring the solution of a difficult subproblem, is a promising method to ob...

We consider the rooted delay-constrained Steiner tree problem which arises for example in the design of centralized multicasting networks where quality of service constraints are of concern. We present a mixed integer linear programming formulation based on the concept of feasible paths which has already been considered in the literature for the spanning tree variant. Solving its linear relaxat...

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...

Flexible functional forms of indirect utility and expenditure functions are frequently used in approximating the behavior of utility maximizing consumers to arrive at demand systems that can be easily estimated. A common nding in time series estimations of the Almost Ideal Demand System is strong persistence in the estimated residuals. This paper suggests two explanations for this result. First...

We estimate Japanese banking inefficiency and the shadow price of problem loans by treating problem loans as a jointly produced undesirable by-product of the loan production process. Our method uses the directional output distance function of Färe et al. [R. Färe, S. Grosskopf, D.-W. Noh, W.L. Weber, Characteristics of a polluting technology: Theory and practice, Journal of Econometrics 126 (20...

For stocks traded on the Hong Kong Exchange, the median of five prices taken over the last minute of trading is currently chosen as the closing price. We introduce a stochastic control formulation to target such a median benchmark in an empirically justified model which takes the key microstructural features into account. We solve this problem by providing an explicit and efficient algorithm wh...